Tooling gold stars on bookcloth
Custom Wedding Album
My client wanted her album to look like the night sky with hundreds of gold stars. I hadn’t done much tooling on cloth before so I knew I needed to practice. The things I tested were: heat, moisture, pressure, and how many impressions of clear and gold foil I’d need.
What I tried:
Misting with water before blind tooling - the cloth I was using was Cialux. There is some grain to it but not a lot. Steam would help crush the grain, but I didn’t find that it made that much difference.
Pressure - the bigger star was much easier to determine pressure. I basically pressed as hard as I could! The smaller star was a different story. I continually pressed with the same pressure as the bigger star and it sunk too far into the board (when it was too deep I had a hard time getting clean edges on the star).
Temperature - I needed to be on #1 on my hot plate, which was a gentle hiss when I cooled the tool on a damp sponge. When the tool got too hot there was too much creep up the sides and when it was too cool I couldn’t get the clear foil or gold to stick.
Number of impressions - because there were so many stars to do I decided two impressions at each stage was appropriate to get a star I was happy with (6 impressions total per star).
My process:
Position star template where I wanted it and put weights on it
Two impressions blind
Two impressions with clear foil
Two impressions with gold foil
Check under template to make sure I was happy with what I got
Clean around stars. Usually I use a tooth pick to clean up the little bits that may creep up the sides but on cloth I found my crepe eraser worked much better.
