Directions for Making Hot Glue Seals

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These seals are really flexible (kind of rubbery) so they won't break in the mail.
Since you can make them large or small you can use them like regular seals or you can make larger card embellishments out of them. My friend, Barbara, and I made several of these one night. Here are our notes:

On a ceramic tile* place a 1" or so piece of hot glue stick. This is very flexible. We made larger seals and smaller seals. It's just a starting place. Hold the glue in place with a piece of wire, like a large paperclip unfolded, and then blast it with your heat gun until it melts into a little puddle.

You can stop at this point and stamp into the hot glue using a stamp inked up with pigment ink or you can keep going. Note, you do NOT need to push the stamp down into the glue like you do with sealing wax. You just sort of set the stamp on top and it will sink down it. This is because you are melting the glue a lot more thoroughly than you would sealing wax. After you've put the stamp in the glue set it aside and let it cool pretty thoroughly before trying to pull it out. The glue will pull the rubber off the cushion if you get impatient (yes, that was the voice of experience).

Some variations that we tried were; stirring a small amount of Pearl-Ex into the glue. This was just a great look, probably my favorite. This has the added benefit of cooling the glue down while you're working with it so that it doesn't stick to the stamp so much. We used duo yellow/green Pearl-Ex in a couple and they had an almost a neon look to them. Very dramatic. We also did one with gold Pearl-Ex and it looked kind of Mayan. The neat thing is that if you don't add too much Pearl-Ex, the glue remains transparent (assuming you started with clear glue) and you can get a hint of the cardstock color behind the seal.

We also stirred some AIG into it but the effect was kind of lost. Beedz didn't work at all, they kind of made it look like the seal was growing hair. We also tried some little gold flake things (can't remember the name) but they also looked like hair.

One thing that we had a lot of fun doing was putting different colors of glue together. We'd start of with a base color, say clear or white, melt it and then add small chunks of different colored glue into it and melt them into the base color. It was a lot of fun to use the wire to stir the colors into one another like you do with chocolate or raspberry sauce on a plate. We got some neat heart shaped effects on the seals this way and also one that came out looking like Wedgwood (you know, the ceramics). Barbara made an interesting '60s psychedelic looking seal by doing this with 4 primary colors of glue in a base of clear glue. She didn't stamp anything into that one because she liked it so well.

Glue the seals onto cardstock using Perfect Paper Adhesive. It curled the paper the least and held the seals firmly. Hot glue and Allene's craft glue both made the seal sit up too high.

* A ceramic tile is my favorite option. Paper sticks to the seal, which is good for gluing but makes the seal opaque so that the cardstock color doesn't show through. To be removed it has to be laboriously worked off. Foil tears the seal when removed, waxed paper melts under the
heat and has to be worked off like paper. Someone suggested Teflon (available in cookware departments). I haven't tried it yet but it sounds like a good idea.