Laser Transfer Foil - TESTING

Some time in the near future I hope to be starting up a business with Vicky. It will end up being something to do with the stationary industry and so lately I have been looking at all different kinds of wedding invitations. This is all for another post so I will get down to the foil I bought.

I have always been a fan of foil printing. Whenever I see a book or piece of design work that has incorporated it, I instantly think it adds a bit of quality. So when I found out that you can easily replicate it using a few basic things I was all up for trying it out.

What you need is:

• Laser transfer foil.
• A laser printer.
• A laminator.

That's it. Most design students I know have access to the latter 2, and the foil is available online for a fiver. I would post the link to where I got mine but I am not entirely happy with this batch so will update this post in the future if I manage to get the process down to a tee. For now though I thought I would show you my quick results.

What you do is print out your document with the parts that you want to cover in foil in black. Then cover the black parts with the foil, cover with another sheet of paper and feed through a laminator. The heat will bind the foil to the black area of the printout and you should be able to pull away the excess. Ideally you are supposed to use a greaseproof type of paper to cover the foil when putting into the laminator and I think this may be why my outcome was slightly patchy due to the grain of paper I used to cover it.

ADDED - STEP BY STEP
(Any normal person would have just taken pictures of each step)

As you can see, the foil is grainy in places and you can see the original black print below it. When I get a proper design to try the foil out with I will use some greaseproof paper and hopefully the foil will be a solid block. It actually looks better in the flesh than it does in the phone pictures above.

I have some Kraft Paper on the way too, so mixing that and this foil will be a fun experiment!