Get The Look - Gilding Flakes

We have all been going mad for that gold look, gold has been everywhere, it's been raining gold! OK, perhaps not, but it is proving to be the desirable look for the season, so I have the final Get The Look in my Gold series, well at least for the time being, and it is a little exploration into that stock favourite Gilding Flakes.

Let's do this! It is Get The Look – Gilding Flakes!

What Are You On About, Kim? Gilding Flakes?

Like Transfer Foils and Leafing Pens, Gilding Flakes have been with us for yonks but gilding flakes kind of made a dramatic comeback a couple of years ago in the papercraft and stamping community and suddenly they were everywhere. Literally! Do you find that? They just get EVERYWHERE! Open that jar and those flakes travel, dude!

Yeah, just don't get me started on their ability to stick to your WHOLE LIFE! Argh! OK, I will come clean, I have a sort of like/hate relationship with gilding flakes. I like the look of the finished product but I'm not that fond of working with them. It is a bit like working with flock: the stuff sticks to any tiny bit of static it can; dare to breathe and you will be trying to remove it from yourself and your work area for months. #exaggeratemuch?

But overcome the working-with-them niggles and you can get some lovely looks with gilding flakes and hey it's shiny, so it can't be all bad?! #easilydistractedbysparklythings

Gilding flakes are an ultra-thin metal alloy (I'm assuming you aren't working with the real McCoy here, by the way) that imitates the precious metal colours like silver and gold. As well as silvers and golds, you can also find flakes in coppers and colour mixes and there are some really beautiful colours out there.

You can find gilding flakes in many of the art and craft shops that you probably already buy from and there are lots of different brands providing them now (you can find a few suggested products in the links below).

The gilding flake products I have personally used are from Cosmic Shimmer, IndigoBlu and Crafty Notions, (other brands are available) but they are all much the same and it is best to go for the best price per volume for your budget.

So How Do You Use Them?

Gilding flakes are another product that work with a tacky surface, just like the transfer foils. If you can make a surface tacky then you can apply gilding flakes. Many of the suppliers provide a specialist, slow-drying (very, very, very slow drying) glue to use with their gilding flakes such as the IndigoBlu FlitterGlu and the Cosmic Shimmer Flake and Glitter Glue. You can stamp with these glues, which is great, but be prepared to have to really clean your stamps afterwards.

Gilding flakes also work beautifully with dry adhesives like Stick It, double-sided adhesive sheets, adhesive foam, etc. So again you can die-cut shapes and cover them with gilding flakes just like the transfer foils.

Here is an ultra-quick guide on how to use them, but you can find loads more information on YouTube and your other favourite learning platforms.

Before you open that jar, gather together the surface you want to add gilding flakes to, a tacky adhesive – I'm using die-cut double-sided adhesive tape to add arrows to a ticket wallet – a large-mouthed container with a lid, like an ice cream tub, and a textured sponge or a hard bristle brush. I use an old piece of Ranger Scrub It as my texture sponge but you can buy texture sponges too.

Carefully open your gilding flakes pot so as not to let the flakes fly everywhere (they will anyway but you can try to limit the escape). Hold the item you want to cover over the large-mouthed container and cover with flakes. Dab the flakes into the adhesive firmly and make sure you have covered the whole area.

Finish up by using the texture sponge or brush to smooth away the straggly bits, still holding the item over the container to catch the residue flakes as best you can. You can then store the leftover gilding flake pieces in the ice cream tub for use on another project (you don't want to even try getting them back in the original container).

Of course you can use them on a flat surface not held over the ice cream tub – just work with them carefully and brush the leftover pieces into your ice cream tub once you are done.

Remember not to sneeze, cough or breathe! OK, you can breathe, I don't want you to pass out now, do I? Well, unless you want a gilded face as it smacks down onto your work surface. Hey you can SO pull off that look!

If you remember back to the Transfer Foils and Leafing Pen, you can see that you get a much more textured look with the Gilding Flakes.


Ready To Gild Everything That Isn't Moving?

It's a gilding flake frenzy! Get ready to gild everything and here are some ideas to get you started:

• Gilded lettering using dies and Stick It.
• Make over those dull alphabet stickers into glitzy gold.
• Revamp that box, you know it needs it.
• How about a gold pineapple on your mobile phone case (SO hot right now).
• New gold pencil tin, anyone?
• Oh was that a ceramic vase you gave a gold twist to? 

Yep and I used a tacky PVA glue, like Hi-Tack, but let it dry a little before using the brush to remove excess flakes. 

I know you guys can come up with a tonne of gold creative ideas, so go on then! One final tip before I go: if you need your gilding flakes to be hard-wearing, then you might want to use a sealant product over the top so that you don't have to worry about the flakes coming off. Shellac is traditionally used to seal gilding when needed but you can also try your acrylic-based products.


Gold Is The Way!

Hope you have enjoyed my small taster into the world of Get The Look - Gold. You can find my other blog posts full of Gold techniques and ideas here:



and feel free to share these posts with your friends if you have found them useful.


There are lots of other ways to get the look that I've not even touched on, so have fun experimenting and I would love to hear any gold stories or check out any gold projects you have so please do drop a message in the comments below.

Come back in two weeks' time (18th March 2015) when I will be sharing Get The Look - Watercolour. See you then!

Get The Look - Gold Leafing Pens

Last week I was getting that totally on-trend gold look with transfer foils after the release of the new Heidi Swap Minc Foil Applicator*. But there are other ways to add some metallic glitz and glamour to your projects, so this week I thought I would show you how to get the look with leafing pens.

[*Just so you know there are affiliate links in this blog post, if you click them and then go on to buy something I get a small commission at no extra cost to you and it helps me to run the blog. Thanks for your support.]

It is Krylon Leafing Pen time!

Eh? Leafing Pens?

The leafing pens from Krylon* are a paint pen that is filled with a metal pigment and solvent formulation. You can find it in silver, copper and 18kt gold colours.

18kt gold? Ching ching! We're in the money!

OK, so we aren't in the money – there isn't any actual gold in the pen. Sorry to burst that bubble. If you look at the specification sheet on the Krylon website, it says bronze pigment *sigh*.

Anyways...these pens come with a chisel nib and produce strong metallic colours which have that perfect metal glow to them and they are acid-free so great for papercrafts. But you can use them on various other surfaces as well such as fabric, ceramic, glass, wood, plastic, metal.

What gives these the edge over other gold pens you may have in your stash is that the finish really does look like metal leafing or plating.

Pen Key:
1 Krylon 18kt Gold Leafing*
2 ZIG Fabricolor
3 ZIG Painty
4 Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Gold 250
5 Cricut
6 ZIG Writer
7 ZIG Wink Of Stella Brush

and help up to catch the light:

The ZIG Fabricolor gets the closest to the Krylon Leafing Pen shine, but what you can't see in the photos is that there is a slight redish tint to the ZIG Fabricolor gold and the colour is not quite as even as the leafing pen but it is still not bad in the shiny gold stakes.

How Do You Use Them?

The Krylon Leafing Pen* works like other paint pens. When you first take the pen out of the packet, the nib is paint free and white. To start your pen off, you need to give it a really good shake then depress the nib a few times to start the flow of the paint into the tip.

My pen is kind of old and has been somewhat abused so the nib is now a bit tatty, but you get the idea. I ought to change the nib really, which you can do by the way, I just haven't gotten around to buying any replacement nibs* yet. #notlazyjustbusy #okandabitlazytoo #yougotmethere

Once you have the paint flowing, you can use it just like a pen and every now and then you may need to press the nib down to get more paint flowing, particularly if you haven't used it for a while. Giving the pen a good shake from time to time is a good idea too.

Hold your horses! Is that a page protector? Yep, you can even add your own gold accents to your memory keeping, project life, scrapbook page protectors.

Now that you have the paint flowing, you can draw and write with the pen just as you would with any other chisel-nibbed pen and here is a simple project to get you started.

You will need:
Krylon 18kt Gold Leafing Pen*
Notebook to decorate*
Vellum*
Paper
Pencil
Brush pen (Bimoji from Kuretake) or sentiment stamp

Start with a template of what you want to draw. You can just go ahead and draw your design freehand of course but with a template you can make multiples of the same pattern, great if you want to sell the product #hint.

Then place the sheet of vellum over the top of your template and lightly trace the design onto the vellum.

Having shaken and primed your Krylon 18kt Gold Leafing Pen* (see above), start using it on the traced design.

Woop! Woop! Trend Alert – Pineapples are SO hot right now! (Think Will Farrell in Zoolander).

Moving rapidly on...

Once you have finished let the paint dry, it takes around 10 min to be touch dry and after 2 hours you can handle it how ever you need. I added a sentiment with a brush marker pen and my favourite at the moment is the Bimoji Fude pen from Kuretake (you can use a stamp if you prefer) and wrapped the vellum around the cover of the notebook.

I used the template again on some shrink plastic* to make a matching page marker - cute!

OK So What Other Projects Could You Do With Leafing Pens?

As well as drawing and writing, the pen is also good for adding block colour to sections as I did in the Designer Notebook pattern project that I made for the Blitsy Discover blog*.

Then you can add metallic borders to projects like this altered dominoes project that I did for Paperbabe Stamps*, yeah I get around!

Don't forget that it works on all sorts of surfaces so adding metallic accents to all your projects is super easy and, wait for it... SO hot right now!

So do you have this pen in your stash? What do you use yours for? Are you tempted to get it if you haven't got it? I would love to hear your Krylon Leafing Pen stories so drop me a comment below and let me know what you would use yours for.

For more ways to Get The Gold Look check out these posts:

Some suggested products (*all of these are affiliate links):

Krylon 18kt Gold Leafing Pen* Ama	Krylon 18kt Gold Leafing Pen* Eba	Anitas A4 Plain Vellum Paper Stack*
Papermania A4 Clear Shrink Plastic*	Ranger Shrink Plastic*	Krylon Leafing Pen replacement nib*
Moleskine Plain Cahier*

InLinkz.com

Get The Look - Gold Transfer Foil

I'm sure that you have noticed that gold is super on trend this season for papercraft projects and with the release of Heidi Swapps' foiling machine, Minc Foil Applicator, at the CHA in January you can't help but have noticed that foiling techniques and gold foiled products are starting to pop up everywhere.

[*Just so you know there are affiliate links in this blog post, if you click them and then go on to buy something I get a small commission at no extra cost to you and it helps me to run the blog. Thanks for your support.]

Go Gold! It's your birthday!

Time to get the look and I'm going to get the look with transfer foils today. 


Eh? Transfer Foils?

Transfer foils have been around for years but they are definitely getting a makeover so it might be time to dig them out of your stash and have a play. 

Transfer foils are an ultra-thin layer of metallic coloured foil adhered to a thin plastic sheet, you place the dull side on to something sticky and burnish it down with your finger or a bone folder, then when you peel the sheet away the metallic foil is left behind.

They come in a whole range of different colours and designs. You can find them in sheets or rolls.

What Can You Use Transfer Foils With?

Transfer foils can be used with glues and dry adhesives. But you also can transfer them using heat. Machines like the Heidi Swapp Minc Foil Applicator use heat to transfer and stick the foil onto a laser ink printed image.

Whatever glue or adhesive you use tackiness is key so if your glue needs time to get tacky, then wait for it to get tacky before pressing on the transfer foil.

A perfect place to start are double-sided tapes, double-sided foams and products like the Stick It adhesive sheets or the Xyron Sticker Maker refills. I'm using Stick It as I don't have the Xyron Sticker Maker but I'm guessing the adhesive would work just fine with transfer foils.

I love using transfer foils with glue pens as well, you have the freedom to draw or write whatever you like and foil it. You can use transfer foils on stamped images too if you use the various glues you can use on stamps, like Flitterglu and Flake and Glitter. But don't forget products like Stamp N Bond which you apply like you would an embossing powder but once heated the powder becomes tacky.

Oh and get this...you can use Vilene Bondaweb (one of my all time favourite products). The stitchers amongst you are sure to have come across Bondaweb. It is a thin web of glue that melts when heated and is most commonly used to attach fabric to fabric for appliqué techniques and the like.

The bottom line for what to use to attach your transfer foils is that if it is tacky it will stick.


Let's Try It Out!

I die cut some shapes from  a sheet of  thin 3D foam, a sheet of double-sided tape and some Stick It and stuck them to card with a sentiment I wrote using the ZIG Glue pen. I burnished the Stick It and double-sided tape down before taking off the top protective layer and burnished the transfer foil over the top.

And held up to catch the light...

ZOiNks! - no idea what happened with the 3D foam, it has worked perfectly in the past *sigh*. Luckily I have one that I did earlier:

What Next?

Ok so we have tried transfer foils out and it was fun but what can we actually do with them?

• Well how about foiling your die-cuts? 
• Apply the glue thinly through masks and foil it for lovely metallic backgrounds.
• Use Stick It through a mask and foil it.
• Got to LOVE the foiled lettering, what about going big and making some home décor word art?
• Foiled stamped images anyone? 
• Now empty out your embellishments draw(s) and foil everything! Alphas, tags, stickers gems and pearls. 
• Foil your glue dots.
• Get your letterpress plates out and foil away.

In theory if you can apply a tacky adhesive to something then you can foil it!

So far I have tried gems, beads, chipboard alphabet stickers and dry adhesives die-cut like above or through a mask, wet adhesives written with or through masks all with great success so...

Go bling Baby and foil it!

How will you use your transfer foils? Have you been tempted by the Heidi Swapp Minc Foil Applicator? I would love to know. Drop me a comment with your transfer foil stories below.

If you are looking for more ways to get the gold look then check out these posts: