Learning: Foil and Printed Envelope Stickers

So this little "DIY" was a learning project for me.  I wanted to use our printable silver adhesive foil to make Christmas envelope stickers seals for my Christmas cards, and I thought it would be easy.  Turns out that it is easy, but only after I learned a few valuable lessons. Be sure you read on to find out what I did wrong, so that you don't make the same simple mistakes.

To start, I had never played around with making my own "print and cut" image before. After looking for some images in the silhouette store, I decided that I wanted something that would let a little more of the silver show through, since that's the color I wanted in the first place.  I created my own design, a Christmas wreath with the word "joy" inside, and then deleted all the cut-marks.  Then, I took the circular cut-marks from a set of seals that I had found in my silhouette library and was also going to use, by doing a bit of "un-grouping" and copying of pieces of the image.   Turns out, all of that was the easy stuff.  It was good to play around with and try out.

Where the troubles came in was when I actually went to print on the foil.  I first tested my images on a regular sheet of paper to be sure that it would print my created image in the colors I had chosen. (Again,  it was my first time, so I wanted to be sure I did it correctly.)  I was pleased with the outcome, and was feeling pretty good about my own quickness at learning the ropes, when I sent my job through to print onto the foil paper.  Turns out I should have read the directions a little more carefully.  When Silhouette says that the sheets are to be used with your ink-jet printer, it means it.  I was actually not using my home printer, and was using a fancy laser-printer, which is not as easy to use with these foil sheets.  Thus, Silhouette telling you to use an ink-jet printer.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My first real mistake was to not change the settings on the printer.  I had it printing as if it were printing on a regular sheet of computer paper.  But for a laser printer, I needed to change the settings to print for "glossy paper".  I didn't realize that until my first sheet came out with the images shifted and smeared.  I quickly found out that mistake and sent it through a second time.  Unfortunately, one of the problems with a laser printer for this type of paper is how it puts ink on the paper, and as my second sheet went through, the printer still deposited some of the displaced ink from the previous print job onto this sheet.  You can see the comparison between the two sheets below:

The second sheet (on the right) is much better because I used better printer settings, but still had a residue of the ink from the previous print due to using a laser printer.

In the end, because I did not have the best type of printer for the foil at the house where I was, I decided to also print some of the stickers on our printable white adhesive sticker paper.  When the cards went out, I used some of both sticker types I'd printed, since I thought both turned out cute.  Of course, it takes me forever to write that many Christmas cards, so I had a few stickers made that were perhaps a bit more appropriate to the timing of when I expected the cards to be sent out...

Here's to another happy year of crafting and learning!  I love this stuff. :)