Mountain Nana Inks: Have a Heart Full of Love

I fell in love with this Stampin' Up! designer series paper last year but hadn't used it. You know it's part of the eroding of beautiful patterns, colors that are in the papers these days.

Since foiling is a big thing once again with card makers I had to go back and revisit this technique and play with it again. I only slightly messed with foiling back in the early 2000's and things have changed. I now have a laminator, and a little stash of foils from the newer companies so I was set to go.

The stamp set I used is Hero Arts Stamp Kit from January 2016. I thought it would be perfect for the SU papers and some gold foiling. Little did I know with my great enthusiasm and hopes that I would have so many problems getting those little detailed flowers in the heart shaped stamp to foil clearing. I either got spotting adhesion of the foil or a big blogs of foil with out detail. I tired several different ways, sticky powder embossing - foil, run though the big shot; sticky powder embossing -foil, run through the laminator; clear embossing - foil, run through the laminator with or without a cover sheet. Let's just say I threw away a lot of errors. And my frustration was over the top.

In the end I gave up with trying to foil that heart shaped clump of tiny flower shapes and embossed it all with gold embossing powder. However I was still wanting to understand how to make this work. So I took some of the individual flower shapes and ran that with many different ways trying to get the foil to give me a nice clear impression. I also threw away a lot of errors again but in the end I got a pretty good impression with clear embossing powder, melt that, add foil and run through the laminator in a cover sheet once. If I ran it twice I got a blob. If I ran it without a cover sheet I got a blob. You can see the individual flowers at each end of the sentiment strip on the card.

I am sure I will keep trying to figure this out. I think every laminator machine is different and perhaps as my daughter says what embossing powder one uses may have something to do with it too.