Gold Foil Printing Tutorial

Hi everyone! Happy Friday! Today I don’t have a Freebie Friday printable for you. Instead, I have something that’s even better and I’m so excited to share! I apologize in advance for the poor photos. It is so hard to get a camera to focus on shiny things!

I previously shared these gold quote printables, and many liked the gold foil effect, but of course, if you printed it out, it wouldn’t be as pretty. What I suggested to everyone was to trace over it with a gold paint pen. However, I kept on thinking about the gold foil effect and I remembered a post I saw on Pinterest. In this post, the blogger from How About Orange experimented using laser prints, heat transfer foil paper and an iron/printer. It worked pretty well! Then I recently saw a post about a new crafting machine that just came out and it does foil printing. I looked it up and it seemed like it used the same heat transfer foil and the machine is acting like the iron. So, I decided to give this a try with my laser printer and laminator and it worked! Here’s how I did it:

First you’ll need a laser printer, a laminator, laminating foil, tape, and a sheet of cardstock or any heavyweight paper.
The following are affiliate links to the items I used. It does not affect the price you pay, but if you use my link to make a purchase, I get a small commission.

            In this tutorial, I used the MyBinding gold foil, but I also bought these rose gold sheets but they haven’t arrived yet. I used the Scotch TL901 laminator, but any laminator will work.

First, I printed out a version of the quote without the gold foil effect. The reason why I did this was because the gold foil effect caused the laser printer to print some parts lighter than the others, and I wanted it to print in solid black. You can get the PDF for the solid black version here.

Start up your laminator now because they can take a while to heat up!

Next, I cut out a sheet of gold foil that covered the entire print and taped it down at the corners.

Then I placed a sheet on cardstock on top of the foil and taped all the corners. The cardstock is to prevent the foil from directly touching the heating element.

Once it has gone through, gently peel off the tape on the cardstock. You can see the impression of the print on the gold foil.

Gently peel the tape off the corners of the gold foil and peel the gold foil away from the print.

Ta-da! Here’s your shiny new print!

As you can see on the second “c” in “chances”, the foil was a bit wrinkled going into the laminator. However, it’s not that noticeable overall.

I hope you liked today’s tutorial! I am so excited about it, I might end up foiling everything that can fit in my laminator! Do you have any projects where you can apply this? I’d love to know if this can add some sparkle to your projects!

Have a great weekend and happy Mother’s Day!