Tutorial: The Best Paper for Hot Foiling Your Hybrid Prints with Sara!

Hello Everyone! Sara with you today. I have a beautiful, summery project to share with you featuring the Sunkissed collection. With Moonlit sooo close to being released I thought her sister collection would be perfect to play with!

I recently purchased a hot foil machine and have been having the best time with it and so for my blog post today I thought I would do a little trial and error and see what kinds of paper we could print and foil our pretty Traci Reed designs on!

Turns out.. it wasn’t so much trial and error. More like easy peasey lemon squeezy and now I have one more amazing technique I can use on my hybrid projects!

he first kind of paper I tried for printing was Spellbinders Glimmer Card-stock. It is my favorite card-stock for hot foiling so I thought I would give it a try. It is really smooth, and the branding at the top of the PDF smudged after printing,which gave me pause (oh dear!) To make sure it was thoroughly dry,I let it sit overnight. Once the paper absorbed all the ink, it worked perfectly!

I also tried Epson Premium Matte Paper and a white card-stock from my scrapbooking stash. The Epson paper was good for printing-not for foiling. The plan white card-stock worked okay for both but the Glimmer Card-stock was my favorite for both print quality and foiling (AFTER drying time!)

My tips would be:

  • I do think letting it sit overnight and giving it drying time was important! The ink still looked a bit “wet” when it came out of the printer, so I didn’t touch it. I just held it by the edges and carefully set it on a flat surface. I would highly recommend this step!

  • You need a very smooth surface for hot foiling, so I recommend doing a practice run on your smoothest paper and then letting it thoroughly dry before trying to hot foil.

The Glimmer Card-stock worked so well, I printed a couple more TN papers and got to creating!

I used one of the Tie-Dye papers from the Sunkissed collection for my background. I foiled butterflies and flowers and a photo mat to the TN patterns and then layered up some journaling cards and stickers under my photos.

I used the foiled embellishments and some sparkly sequins from my stash to create a diagonal, organic design coming from the center cluster!

I love how this project came out and I hope you do too!

You can see my process video for this layout over on my channel!

Have A Lovely Day!

Sara

TRD Products Used in this Blog Post: