Saturday, 11 October 2014

Gilt lettering and more Discworld stamp yearbooks

It's only been a week and already the school holidays seem a distant memory.  Thanks to a rotten bug, I didn't get as much relaxing crafting done as I wanted but I did manage to play with something I bought years ago.

One of the things I always wished I could do with the books that I create was to make good looking, crisp, gold lettering.  Metallic pens just don't do the job in my experience- they don't shine the way that metal does and the majority of pens just don't go fine enough (the finest one I have is a 0.3mm tip).  But years ago I came across Hugh Spark's webpage which talked about using a product that lets you print with a laser printer, gilt those letters and then transfer that to anything you like as a decal.  The stuff used I bought from Pulsar Pro FX (website was working a few weeks ago but now seems to be down?).

I followed Hugh Spark's instructions and for the most part, it worked well.  There most definitely a learning curve, and there are a lot of steps where things can go wrong.  But after battling the gremlins, I managed to make these...

These were all created as presents for friends.  As you can see, not all had the same spine contents thanks to the decal not always surviving intact to the end of the process!  But it worked well enough and enough survived that I was pleased with what I produced, particularly compared to previous methods.

And after doing all that, I had to get around to making my own.  The observant among you will notice that I have cheated with years and am not making these in year order at this point.  I do plan to fill in those gaps, but I also wanted to have somewhere to put the stamps that I am only lightly collecting again...  *wimper*  I can stop any time I want to...