I've been playing with a couple of hot foil dies today - the Golden Days Hot Foil Plate from Altenew - a stunning big bold floral, and the Solid Hot Foil Plate from Waffle Flower to make sure I don't waste a mm of expensive foil!

Now the hot foil plates are a little more expensive that a standard die - that's because they're more expensive to make, but they can do a lot more than a standard die too, and more than just hotfoiling!  For my first two cards, I'm not going anywhere near foil.

Card 1 - is about as simple as you can get but the results are simply stunning.   All I did here was run the die through my machine with an embossing rubber in my sandwich and I got this super deep and detailed debossed floral.  I decided to leave it exactly as it was for a classy look and just added a sentiment from Concord and 9th's all the birthdays stamp set.  However, if you wanted to add colour you could use the matching stencil to layer the colour and details into the flower.

Card 2 - I took the debossing effect one stage further my using my brayer to ink up the die before running it through the machine with the same sandwich.  This gives you a letterpress look.  I used versafine clair ink in monarch.  Just rinsed it off the brayer and the die as soon as I was done.  

Card 3 - and we're onto foiling.   I use a glimmer for hot foil - its very easy once you've done it a couple of times.  I used rose foil from WRMK to do the foiling - its great foil and in big rolls so lasts ages.  To get a more versatile look I took just a crop of the foiling and I decided to try reverse foiling with the Waffle Flower plate onto black so I could slice them together for a yin-yang look.   Now I will admit I hit a few snags - first I broke my old die cut machine doing the reverse foiling - I overshimmed it as I was struggling to get the foil solid in the middle of my image.  I tried again with my new machine and no shims.  Same results.  Turns out that cardstock is very important when solid foiling - if its not thick and super-smooth it won't take evenly (see card 4) so I gave up and just used the very thin sliver I got perfect on the edge of the foiling on my black card.  To add more foil  to the card itself I used some strips of ds-tape and simply put the foil over the top.   For the sentiment I hand wrote Hello on black card using a Kuretake Squeeze and Roll 2 way glue pen - give it 30 seconds to dry clear and you can foil anything you write with it!

Card 4 - finally cracked the reverse foiling!  I went back to 300gsm super-smooth white card and the reverse foiling worked like a dream all over - no need for shims and no patchy areas in the middle.  It just foiled.  I trimmed the panel to a rectangle to fit my card and added a die cut and stamped sentiment below using all kinds of happy dies from The Greetery plus a sentiment from Itty Bitty Celebrations from MFT.

Hopefully that gives you some insights into how to get the most from your hot foil plates - and I made the mistakes so you don't have to!

STORE UPDATES

There won't be as much new stock in store this week - we have the latest Waffle Flower release to add and will do it as soon as we finish packing the Lawn Fawn release orders as that put us behind a little.

We will be ordering some more new Altenew products this week as well as the upcoming release from The Greetery.

We have some more new products from Kuretake to add - some restocks, some new now they finally have UK distribution again.  We have gansai tambi's coming back as well as their fineliner pens.

We have also sourced some new felt finally that we are happy die cuts cleanly after our old supplier closed before the pandemic.   We'll be putting 24 colour rainbow packs in 8inch square sizes into the store this week. 

Catch you next weekend.  

Tara