Fun Day

Every year in our department we try to have a fun day, usually around the holidays.  You may remember last year's paper marbling extravaganza!?  Well, this year, since the department is still under construction we decided to have a really low key fun day of hot stamping and tooling.  You may have seen older books with gold tooling on the cover or a fancy gold label on the spine...that's done with stamping tools and/or a hot stamping machine and gold foil.  So, this past Friday we heated up the hot stamper and dragged out the hot plates and had some fun.  Some people put tooling on books, others decorated holiday cards/envelopes, and a couple of our more artsy students created some original and fun artwork.  It was indeed, a fun day.  Here's some shots I took of the tools...

 Basically you heat the hand tools on a hot plate, put the foil on the thing you're stamping and then once the tool is hot enough you stamp and the adhesive on the back of the foil adheres it to the portion of the surface that's been heated.