Scraps of Life: Fun with Foil

Hello! I am sharing a project over on the Really Reasonable Ribbon Blog today. If you are in need of ribbon, trims, or mulberry flowers...stop by the RRR store!

I had a fun time playing with foiling over the weekend, and I wanted to share one of the results with you! I made a huge mess, made some mistakes, learned some things!

I have been noticing lots of foiling questions and information on some of the card making groups and YouTube channels that I follow. I was around crafting world when foiling was popular once or twice before, and will confess that I was not really into it. We used a hot iron to heat it up back in those days, and it often produced terrible results. {smile}

The type of foiling I used for this card is called "transfer foil." This type of foiling needs something for the foil to stick to, such as embossing powder, glue, toner ink, heat and stick powder, or similar.

I created my foiling by first heat embossing the sentiment with Versamark ink and clear embossing powder. Once the sentiment was heat embossed, I placed a sheet of foil over the top of the cardstock and placed the two pieces into a parchment paper carrier folder. I then passed the "sandwich" through a hot laminating machine. Presto! Chango! A foiled sentiment!

Note: I investigated the hot foil machine method of foiling (such as the Spellbinders Glimmer Hot Foil Stamp Press), but ultimately decided I did not want to own yet another machine that takes up valuable real estate in the craft room, and it would cost me a lot of money buying the foiling plates. The laminator is pretty small and can be used for a ton of other things, plus it was super cheap on Amazon!

Because the foil is so shiny, it is very hard to get a good photograph! If you are familiar with heat embossing with gold powder, you will be able to see that the foil is quite a bit smoother and shinier than embossing powder.

I did run this through the laminator twice, which made the foiling a bit "thicker" than I wanted, but it still looks nice.

To make sure I was keeping the shine going, I used Glitz Ribbon and Metallic String to finish off the card. The card is a standard 5 1/2" x 4 1/4" made from black cardstock. I lined the inside with white cardstock to give a place to stamp or write a message.

I wrapped a piece of the purple Glitz Ribbon around the bottom of the card and added a loopy bow made from the gold Metallic String to the left edge. I created a flower cluster with some purple, blue, and yellow flowers. (Full supply list below.)

I placed a few glitter enamel dots around here and there. I am pretty excited to try more foiling techniques and have a list going of what to do next!

Thank you so much for stopping by!