Adding to the Arsenal

Today I added yet another toy to my electronic craft corner. As if I did not already have enough to occupy my time.

A laser printer! Since I bought my Minc 6 weeks ago, I have tried so many foiling techniques, but it always comes back to the best way is a laser print. I tried glue, embossed sticky, toner pen, I bought a boat load of Heidi Swapp coated paper, but today, I saw this compact printer on sale at Office Depot, so I caved.

My air printer does scanning and color but it is inkjet, it doesn't do anything for the foil arena. So now I have both. My electronics corner has no more room for anything else. Let's hope nothing else comes on the market that I absolutely MUST HAVE.

For my first test I loaded a journal card from my digital Savannah collection from Studio Calico's February Documentor kit into the silhouette software. I resized it to A6 and printed it on card stock with the laser printer. Then I ran it through the Minc with pink foil on a 4 heat setting. It came out as a beautiful shimmery frame to use on my next Documentor spread. So many possibilities!

 

I have truly blown my craft budget this month and it is only 10 days in. Glad it is a short month.

Thanks for stopping by.

 

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Heart shaped envelopes

I am taking an online Valentines card class. Today's lesson was creating mini envelopes out of a heart cut out. It would make a perfect craft for kids to make valentines for their friends. But I wanted something big enough to send in the mail, perhaps with an A2 sized card inside.

So I got on my silhouette and developed a heart template that when folded was the size of an A2 envelope. I included perforated cut lines where the folds would work best. I tested out 2 previous versions before I settled on this one.

I used paper, not cardstock, so my cutter blade was set on 2 and I selected copy paper setting; it took the full sheet of 12x12 paper.

You must be extremely careful when removing the paper from your cutting mat because the paper tears so easily, I also learned that during test 1 and 2. "Focus on the task at hand". My mantra for 2016.

Once the heart has been removed from the cutting mat you can start folding on the perforations.

These are the finished products. I would make certain to use some type of adhesive to make sure it did not pop open if it was sent through the mail. Also let the recipient know not to throw out the envelope after all that effort!

I will include a copy of the cut file... If I can figure out how to do that..

Thanks for stopping by.

 

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Sticky embossing with Minc

So today I did another test with my Minc. My last post a few days ago explains my initial experience with gold foiling. This time I used a heat tool with sticky embossing powder. Sticky is made by Ranger and when applied to versamark ink with a heat tool it turns into an adhesive.

My first test through the machine was on a 2 setting which was way too hot for the transfer. The words were smooshed beyond recognition. I attempted a second time on a low setting of 1 and it was much better, the happy birthday was legible and clean. In the photo below you can see it was done on the pink card stock.

 

My next test was to use the laser printed tree line. I love this photo and I thought it would be gorgeous in gold. It came out beautifully! I cannot wait to make a card out of that one.

Lastly I used up the negatives on black laser paper. I think I won't try copying black cardstock next time. The quality of the laser is not good enough to give me crisp results.

That is the end of my supplies from my Minc starter kit. I have some other colors on order and plan a trip to Michaels later today too.

Until next time...

 

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