Happy Monday! Welcome to Day 14! Today's installment is a step-by-step on producing and affixing wax seals as embellishments to stationery. I have always been a little afraid of wax seals. They look tough and messy and they are just not something that I do often.
I recently got a project that utilized them so I thought I'd do a tutorial in case anyone out there feels the same! All of these products were purchased at Paper Source, FYI. They do NOT have a large selection of wax seal stamps, outside of initials and a couple of others. Nostalgic Impressions looks to have a wide variety of wax seal materials, including the self adhesive kinds!
You'll need a glue gun that can accommodate sealing wax sized sticks
Cranberry sealing wax... I think you can get 6-8 seals from each stick, but it also depends on the size you'd like for them to be...
Wax seal stamp...
I used wax paper simply because its easy to peel the seals off the paper. Now I know that many will add the seal directly to whatever they are using these for (i.e. stationery, sealing envelopes, etc.), but I felt more comfy turning these into embellishments that I could affix myself later with glue dots/lines (note also that this is the most appropriate adhesive to use). Just gives me more control.
After letting the gun warm up for a few minutes, I squeezed out some circles. The ideal thing to do is to make sure you are not making the circles too shallow. They should have some body to them so that the stamp has something to hold onto.
Let them cool a bit... Maybe 10-20 seconds...
Then use your stamp... I needed a fleur de lis symbol so I used a Paper Source rubber stamp (not ideal, but it can be used with these other Paper Source branded tools).
Then voila! You have created your wax embellishments. They look like little tomatoes don't they? Make sure you peel them off the wax paper as soon as they are stable enough. If you don't they will be tough to extract. The wax is also very friendly in this state and I went as far as to trim some of the edges (to make them a little more circular if the "blob" factor had gone too far) and you couldn't even tell!
Let me know if you have any more wax seal tales/tips/resources!!!Take care and we'll be back tomorrow! --ct
