What is Cold Laminate?

I originally posted this in my Stampamajiggies blog. But I can't see the point of having two blogs when this one has become such a mish-mash of things around me. So I am moving posts on this blog, to delete the other one. I'm trying to post them by marking them with the date they were originally posted. Fingers Crossed.
This post was originally uploaded on: 14 June 2006
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Cold laminate is the name given to techniques using "Quick Laminate".
Brand names for that, the one I usually buy is Marbig, available at Post Offices (and also Kmart I believe, I pick mine up when I go buy stamps). Any clear sticky sheet apparently works.

Great, now what do you do with it?

You can stamp on the shiny side, with permanent black ink. StazOn is great, but many have had success with Memories, Ancient Page and the like.
When you have stamped on the shiny side you can do a few things:
cut out the image and stick it to a background before you stick the image down you can colour the sticky side with either pearl ex, gel pens, krylon pen to highlight some areas, paint (acrylic, lumiere, etc) here's some other ways of colouring which were given to me a while back when I asked the question:
Gel pens, chalks, glitter, nail polish (even $2 cheap ones, and some are metallic too!), Marvy Metallic markers, Pearl Ex, Eye colour shadow you no longer use, watercolour pencils, you can apply leafing foil, variegated leafing flakes, etc.

If the back is no longer sticky after having applied the colour use some clear adhesive like Crystal Laquer, Dimensional Magic and the like, or if you have large black areas on the image you can use double sided tape.

There is another method to use those Quick Laminate (QL) sheets...

Take a photocopied image (toner photocopy, the "good old photocopies", magazine images also work, and I hear that laser-printed images work too). Stick the image onto the sticky side of the QL (so the side with the image you want to use is on the sticky side. When you do that, beware of a few things: lint and stray hair, they are almost impossible to remove once stuck, and also that the QL is filled with static and sometimes jumps on the paper (or vice versa if you place the QL on top of the paper) and can stick in the wrong place, so do this step carefully and take your time.
Trim the QL if you need to.
Smooth the image onto the QL, and then soak in a bowl of cold water (and I suspect that's where the COLD comes from, Cold Laminate Transfer, it's the transfer that is a cold transfer, done with Laminate, but we all call Quick Laminate "Cold Laminate"... ) - if the water is warm, the adhesive will soften and you don't want that.
So, soak in cool water for .... 5-10 minutes. I usually wait until I can see that the paper has absorbed some water.
Then with the tip of your finger, rub the paper off the QL. It will roll off. If you still see paper, wet some more and rub some more. It's usually best to try to remove all of the paper as if you place the image onto a dark background, you
see the paper leftover and it's not a good look!! :)
Allow to dry, do not use a tissue or anything to dry, a heat tool will melt the QL and a cloth/tissue will leave lint behind!

When the piece is dry, it will be sticky again ... and you can also see if you removed all the paper (hold to the light , or over a dark surface). If there's some paper left, repeat the soaking/rubbing steps.
You can try this with clear packing tape as well. And other clear sticky labels (Avery or other).

When the QL is dry, you can decorate with the "colouring" methods described above.


Sites with inspiration/instructions:

Hero Arts
Try It Tuesday
BHG.com
Samples on Flickers
Etcetera Web Zine shows a quick method to laminate pins.
Archive of Ginger Stamp (the original site seems to have a glitch, but this link above is working fine.)
Enchanted Ink
Whiskey Creek Stamps
and from Natalie this link: Trishbayley.com

[images added 17 jun 2006]