If like me your a little magpie'ish ( I know, not a real word ) you will have eyed up cards with foiling and dreamed of creating you own designs without the limitations of stamps.
The key component to the hot foiling process is "Toner" this is the powder used by laser copiers to "print" but before you cry out in dis-pare you don't have one your friendly photo copy shop has. Foiling uses the toner that has fused (stuck) to paper and remelts it making it sticky allowing the foil to stick to the printed design
Having watched a demonstration of a foiling machine at a craft show. I remembered the laminating machine which lay gathering dust in the spare room. While looking up laminate machines (which can be picked up from as little as £11) I wondered what the difference was the answer would seem to be not a lot both do the same thing "heat".
Having said that the rollers inside can be very different, some laminate machines don't have solid rods inside and are made up of a number of separate wheels to feed the pouches through this can result in a ripple effect in the finished sheets. having considered this difference the other consideration was "how hot" I was lucky the Rexel machine I already owned has a temperature control which allowed me to have very good control for my experiment.
first I printed out a number of little pictures with a laser printer to play with having set my laminating machine at the 150 micron setting (it seemed as good enough place to start as any).
It didn't go so well some how I ended up with a rectangle of foil instead of my flourish so I turned down the temperature a little and tried again.
This turned out a little better but far from brilliant so down went the temperature
again a little too far it seemed as I was missing bits up and down went the temperature for a while and it seemed I would never get it right when I decided to put an extra piece of card into the carrier sheet to press the foil a little and........result ! An un-crinkled perfectly foiled flourish.
I'm sure you will agree for the home crafter the results are excellent Here I have photocopied some flourishes onto some papers that came free in a magazine
It didn't go so well some how I ended up with a rectangle of foil instead of my flourish so I turned down the temperature a little and tried again.
This turned out a little better but far from brilliant so down went the temperatureagain a little too far it seemed as I was missing bits up and down went the temperature for a while and it seemed I would never get it right when I decided to put an extra piece of card into the carrier sheet to press the foil a little and........result ! An un-crinkled perfectly foiled flourish.
I'm sure you will agree for the home crafter the results are excellent Here I have photocopied some flourishes onto some papers that came free in a magazine
