My Minc and Me

My Heidi Swapp Minc foil laminating machine arrived today. I picked it up for 1/2 price at an end of year sale at Studio Calico. Funny I did not even know I needed one, but here it is.

Before it arrived I had to make space. I decided my cameo and Minc could share space on the same metal table, but I had to build a shelf to hoist one up when the other was in use. I bought brackets at Ace Hardware for about $5 and used a sign I had picked up at a tag sale last year as the shelf, a few mollies, screws and a hammer put me in business.

The starter kit came with 3 coated card stock tags, one very large transfer folder and a small piece of flimsy (very) gold foil. (6 X 12 inches maybe). I had watched a few videos on You Tube before I tried it out, so I wasn't afraid of messing up. Luckily I knew that toner adheres to the transfer sheet, so I am very cautious to make sure there is none showing. Using a piece of copy paper as a shield works.

Two tags came out pretty good, but on the third, the arrow had two smudges, but I am not sure what caused it. It was not until after I bought this toy I found out that it only works with toner from a laser printer. Of course mine is inkjet and I don't work anymore, so it's not like I could print at the office. But UPS does laser copying and they are a back roads 3 miles from here.

I developed 4 pages of script and drawings and brought them with a piece of black card stock and several sheets of Neenah solar white to print on. I copied the black card stock so I could get a full sheet of black toner. $1.60 later I was ready to begin some testing.

I tested ink on the coated tags, dye worked and so did Stazon on a stamp and it wiped away from the gold foil.

Next I used a leaf die on the black toner paper, ran that through, my oh my. It really came out beautiful.

As always, you never throw away the negative, so I tried those on the same black toner paper. They came out ok, not great. Then I tested pigment ink on the negative leaf foil thinking I could get a white leaf. No go, in fact it gave my foil poc marks.

I am not anxious to use up all of my starter kit foil, not until reinforcements arrive or I take a trip up to Michaels... So I won't do any large scale testing on my scripts and drawings until the weekend. I may do some more die cuts tomorrow and I also want to test it with sticky embossing powder, on a lower setting, it is supposed to be like magic.

 

We will see. Thanks for stopping by.

 

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