Wax Seal Embellies

 Well here I go again.  Jumping 100% in on a new adventure for me.  Wax seals.  Well kind of new adventure.  Way way back when I was young and it was a "Thing" to have "Pen pals" from different countries it was not unusual to dabble with wax seals.  Those adorable old fashion wax closures you would see on letters in movies, especially ole Victorian movies when special letters were sent through the post.  This was to assure the receiver that the letter or special papers had not been seen as long as the seal on the envelope had not been broken.  My mother being quite a crafty person (probably where I got it from) made me my own seal by taking a brand new Nickle and rubber cementing it to a small spool of thread (as the handle).  I would then drip the wax from an actual candle on the envelope after I had licked it shut then impressed the wax with the Nickle.  

I decided to bring back the wax so to say!  Excited to re-try something old (but not with a Nickle) I hit up Amazon for some supplies.  Valentines Day is on it's way so I indeed wanted a heart stamp and I might as well get an easter one.  Then while I was at it I leaped toward 2 Christmas and then thought I should at least have 2 everyday ones.  Because of course you should never try something new with the bare minimum right?  Then of course I needed wax.  Well there are the candle type ones that you light and drip. But I think those are more for letters.  I want to do embellies so I kept looking.  Well they had these chips.  Well ok....but then you need the spoon and the warmer base and the tea light candles to melt the chips.  Ahhhh...here we go I found wax glue sticks.  I have a bunch of glue guns so I could dedicate 1 to wax.  So I bought a pack of pink for Valentines day and a pack of metallics just because I wanted them.

So my supplies come in and I think I'm ready to go.  Well...Slow down Susan.  This is harder than I remember.  I had a silicone mat to use and melted some pink wax, went to impress it and...hmmmm.  How long do I have to hold this?  When I lifted it was stringing.  So I set it back down and let go of the stamp piece and it sunk so far that when I was able to pull it off the stamp it was nearly translucent.  Try again  This time I held it. Dang it when I lifted it wasn't cooled enough on the bottom and it got a ripply bottom.  Try again.  Hold......hand tired....this is dumb.....can't be right....how long does this take?  I think I need YouTube.

You can see the seal on the far top right how thin it is that's my first.  Then the one on the middle left is the bottom with the blubs from when I lifted too early before it was fully cooled.

Instead went out for coffee with my BFF and had a long talk.  Certain things came to light.  One was that the pink sticks were not wax at all.  They were labeled Acrylic.  The metallic ones are labeled wax/resin.  Still have not tried those.  Another thing we talked about was real glue sticks.  Could those be used?  Could you then use Mica powers to highlight them?  Hmmmmm interesting.  So home I went to check out these ideas.  Interesting....glue from your normal glue gun works!  Mica powders work great too and so do Dollar Tree Mermaid eye shadows.  Its subtle but pretty.  I also found that the metal stamp pops right off quickly if you are using both a low melt gun and if your metal stamp is cool to the touch.  So I kept it on top of a bag of ice and rotated which stamp I was using.  I then took off and tried an entire bag of Dollar Tree mini glitter glue sticks with excellent results.  The less intricate the design the better with those sticks but it worked!

Regular hot glue before using eye shadow

or Mica powder

I can't wait to show you what I make with all these as soon as I figure that out Hahahahaha.

For now this is it. I need to make more of the Pink ones for Valentine cards I want to make.   I'll be back next time with what you can do with these beauties.  Til then Happy Crafting!