Foiled & Festive

December 20, 2017 0 Comments

Hi Dare 2B Artzy friends! It’s Tonya from KraftyEnchantments.com. Is everyone ready for Christmas? If you are, I envy you. My shopping is done, but I still have all of the wrapping to do and I’m still working on last minute Christmas cards.

I thought since I had a fun Christmas card using the Dare 2B Artzy Family Stockings stamp and die set that I’d pop in today to share my card with you.

I’m a huge fan of foiling. I love to use foil to embellish and add sparkle to my cards. You may feel like you’re limited with foil to only being able to use pre-designed foil templates to create your foil designs. The pre-designed templates are typically black & white cardstock with a black pattern, design or sentiment on them that when you run through your foiling machine will allow the foil to stick to the design.  Some of the designs really make for beautiful cards.

However, there’s so much more that you can do with foils if you start looking at your stamps. If you have a scanner and a cheap laser printer you can foil anything you can scan and print to your laser printer. I know some of you may be thinking that it would be expensive. I purchased my Canon Laser Printer for $35-$40 and I saw them on sale during Black Friday at Walmart for the same price. For my scanner, I have the ink jet printer/scanner combo and I’ve seen them for around $50 on sale for a Canon Pixma. If you don’t have a scanner or laser printer, you could also go to your local Office Depot or Office Max and use their equipment for a small fee.

To create a foiled stamp you need to pick an image that has some details on it but you don’t want the image to be too small. First, stamp the image onto some white cardstock using a crisp black ink like Dare 2B Artzy’s Totally Black Ink.  You’ll want to make sure that the ink is dry before you scan the image as you don’t want to get black ink on your scanner glass. With the ink dry, you can now scan the image to your computer.

You can now print the scanned image on your laser printer onto some cardstock. I used 80lb Neenah cardstock to print my stockings on.

Now you can die cut the images if you’re doing different colors like I did or you can just cut the cardstock down so that it will fit through your foiling machine. I used the Anna Griffin Minc machine, but I understand that laminators will also work for foiling as well as long as they have a variable temperature setting. I let my Minc warm up, put the setting on 5 and waited until the green light stopped blinking to let me know it was warm enough.

I placed my stockings into a piece of heavy cardstock folded in half. I like to use 80lb paper or higher to create a folder to put my images in to be foiled. The reason for the heavy cardstock is that it keeps the folder from becoming creased in the foiling machine. If the folder gets creased your images may come out with a crease line through them as well.

I cut a piece of foil just big enough to cover each of the stockings. I used Therm o Web foil in Grass Green, Red Velvet and Turquois Sea. The foil is placed over the images with the shiny side up and the dull side covering the images to be foiled.

Once my machine was warm enough, I ran the folder with the images through the machine. When it comes out of the machine. I place the folder on my crafting desk and run my fingers over the outside of the folder and then on the inside over the foiled images. I don’t know if it helps but I like to believe that it helps seal the foil to the image.

Once the foil cools, I carefully peel back the foil from each of the stockings. They look so amazing! I love that the foil picks up all the detail of the Dare 2B Artzy Family Stocking stamps.

I put my card together using some Dare 2B Artzy Holly Days paper collection and layered up the stockings over some white die cut strips. I added a button and some bakers twine in red for some dimensional details along with some green pearls.

Foiling with your existing stamps is a great way to stretch your stamps and get more uses out of them other than just coloring, inking. This technique would work really well with background stamps, border stamps and regular stamped images. I highly recommend it.

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s card and are inspired to try out some foiling using your stamps.

Hope you have a wonderful Christmas. Reminder that we still have our Sprit of the Season Challenge going on through 12/31 so there’s still time to submit your cards for the challenge.

Hugs

Tonya

Also in dare2bartzy.com/blog