Category Archives: surface decoration

Further experiments in fabric lamination

4 Replies

I have been playing with some different materials for laminating with including aluminium foil, metallic and hollographic papers to see if they will laminate and what the effects will be once they are nuno felted. These images on the left were taken after applying the medium through some Christmassy stencils. The images on the right after soaking in warm water overnight and attempting to remove what had not been glued to the organza.

Aluminium foil
All the foil detached from the medium leaving just the medium attached to the organza.


Holographic paper
Again, the holographic foil preferred to detach from the organza than from it’s card backing

Foiled wrapping paper
This one worked reasonably well although the medium is a little thick in places leading to white lines.

Mirrored card
The red plastic film on top of the “mirror” partially adhered but obviously was not longer reflective.


Metallic card
This sort of worked, at least it detached easily from the paper but the result is not very metallic.


Textured metallic card
This did not work at all, it behaved a lot like aluminium foil in that the non-glued areas refused to detach.

The only one that really worked out of this batch was the metallic red wrapping paper. A bit disappointing really. :o(

I still attempted to felt a few of them, the medium on its own is quite effective.

Foil wrapping paper
The medium on its own 

Fabric paper lamination

4 Replies

Last week Ruth Lane blogged about her experiences of experimenting with paper lamination, it was so inspirational I immediately bought a tub of gel medium, I couldn’t wait to try it!

The medium arrived yesterday, so I have been busily following Ruth’s instructions, this is how I got on…
I experimented with 4 different papers and using some stencils I had to hand, painting the medium on with a stiff paint brush.

Glitter paper:
Metallic green paper:

Red card:

Handmade paper with tea leaves (this is after soaking as you could not see the stencilling in the photo taken before):

These are the results after soaking and removing the excess paper…
The glitter paper

 The metallic paper, this stencil kept moving so it is not very well defined and looks rather scruffy:
I think the ladybugs on the red card have worked the best of all the stencils, perhaps the others are bit too detailed and the detail was lost (mostly due to my ineptitude with using stencils).

I also had a go at nuno felting a couple of them, I love how the glitter paper has turned out, the organza has ruffled beautifully and both the organza and the glitter catch the light in different ways, I’m afraid my photos don’t do the glitter paper justice, but it really is very shimmery. I will definitely do this again.

The nuno felted lady bugs are pretty cool too and offered some additional learnings:

  • I half expected this to happen, but where there are large areas of the gel medium (the heads) the felt has not attached so well.
  • I’m not sure why but the paper has almost completely rubbed off the one on the right, leaving just the gel medium (which also looks nice) the other 2 are fine. I expect this may be avoided by felting with the organza side facing away from the felt so the paper remains protected. 

 Have you tried this technique? How did you get on?