An Experiment and a Giveaway!

Have you ever been faced with the problem of too many choices? I know you have, lol! This is what I was dealing with after making some new little collage magnets on formica tags....what to seal them with.

I happen to have 3 different glaze products in my stash:
Diamond Glaze by JudiKins
Royal Coat Dimensional Magic by Plaid
Aleene's Paper Glaze

It just so happened that I had made 3 different collages...so I decided to do a little experiment and figure out, once and for all, which product was the best coating for my magnets. I tried to use the same technique for all three. They were all done in the same place on the same day, right in a row. They had the exact same drying time--I applyed the glaze in the late afternoon and let it dry (untouched) overnight. I checked them early the next morning. All three were properly dry and had a nice smooth feel....no stickiness or gooey spots.

On this first magnet I tried the Aleene's Paper Glaze. It came out of the bottle really thick, I had a hard time getting it to cover the image in a smooth manner. I smoothed it out as best I could and looked for air bubbles, which were difficult to see due to the thickness of the glaze.

What is nice about the thickness is that you don't have to worry about it running over your edges, and you definitely will only need one coat!

This dried nice, but the finish is a little lumpy looking and there are a couple spots where it's apparent that I didn't put the finish on evenly and there are a few air bubbles that didn't pop.

I'd have to give this one a C-.

On this second magnet I tried the Diamond Glaze. It has a really nice consistency out of the bottle, flowed on smoothly and was just thick enough to hold it's edge without running over. I liked the ease of use.

The big problem I had was a lot of air bubbles showed up, even though I was careful to start the flow on scrap paper before applying it to my project and tried to work slowly and keep air out of the procedure. After applying it, blew on the surface to see if the bubbles would pop....nope. I then grabbed a pin and attempted to pop them....nope. Then I gently lifted the piece and dropped it on the table hoping the impact would pop them....nope. The only thing that really worked was to take the tip of the pin push the bubbles to the edge and then off of the project. This actually only worked on the bigger bubbles.

It dried very nicely--I like the glaze this one has. One thing I did notice was that the paper actually lifted off the tag surface along one edge. I'm not sure if that is the glaze's fault or if I didn't glue it down properly (I thought I had??) There are quite a few air bubbles that showed up even though I thought I had most of them. Also, I used a Sharpie marker on the top paper and it bled a bit.

I think there may be a learning curve to using this stuff, I'll have to give this one a C.

The third magnet got the Royal Coat. This also came out of the bottle really nice...a titch thinner than the Diamond Gloss. I put it around the edges and it seemed to hold the edge pretty good (I did have one little spot where it flowed down over the edge) and then proceeded to fill in the center area. It filled very nice. Once filled I checked for air bubbles.... there were only a couple and I was able to pop them with a pin.

This dried very nice, has an almost wet look to it. I like the shine. No problem with air bubbles either! Yeah. I think I've found my product!

This one gets an A.

HOW ABOUT A GIVEAWAY??

So there ya go! I'm thinking that I'll add some ribbon to the top and put a nice magnet on the back and see if any of you lovely Reader's would like to have one of them ??? Warts (bubbles!) and all! LOL If you don't mind a couple bubbles, please just leave me a comment here and I'll have a drawing for each of them (3 names will be drawn). They actually did turn out pretty cute, even if there are some flaws :o)

I'll do the drawing on Friday, May 29th.