I have always been obsessed with crafts, making things, drawing you name it, growing up I used to do it. A few years ago I would sit at home colouring to relax long before adult colouring books became a thing. If you’ve been a follower of my blog for a while you will know that I do Project Life, although I’m seriously behind, but any craft that I can get stuck into I always enjoy.
Since opening my online shop my love for stationery has reached a serious level, I’m obsessed with looking at new stationery, buying new things even if they never get used and when I heard that you could now foil your own products I just needed to join in. Today I will be talking about the Heidi Swapp Minc Toner Ink Pen.
There’s a machine available also by Heidi Swapp that allows you to add foil to craft projects. Brent kindly bought it for my birthday and I will be reviewing that fully very soon but I wanted to upload a review on the pen first. These items are very hard to get hold of in the UK as they are from the US but I buy all my items from Hey Little Magpie, the only UK company that I have found that stocks a vast amount of the items.
Foil can only be added onto a project that has used laser ink, it can not adhere to inkjet printers and I was fairly miffed when I read this as I had just bought a new inkjet printer and I wasn’t about to go out and splash the cash on a laser printer, so when I heard that the Minc Foil Toner Ink Pen was available I couldn’t wait to try it out. It was out of stock for about a month but once it came back I bought three so I had plenty of back ups. As soon as it arrived I couldn’t wait to get stuck in.
You have to pump the ink down by pressing the nib onto paper and I had to do this for at least 5 minutes, it took forever for the ink to come through. Once the pen was ready to go, I had a range of card to try my foiling on and I got stuck in. Now the machine has different heat settings depending on the thickness of your card so you would think that matte card would work but it really doesn’t.
I was told by someone who works for Heidi Swapp that smooth card is better however I found only smooth glossy/coated card works, otherwise you end up with a patchy mess which some people may like but I wanted a smooth fully foiled finish.
Writing in general is really quite hard with this pen as the nib is such a funny shape, you can’t get a thin smooth line and the ink runs out pretty quickly before you have to start pumping it through again which usually causes what you have done to become messy. Think of a felt-tip pen that’s on it’s last legs, that’s what this pen is always like.
As you can see from the above photograph, the pen does work really nicely on the smooth coated card. It only appears patchy in places that I must have missed with the pen and the finish is mostly smooth and pretty. I use heat setting three and send it through the machine once to get the above result. The card is around 200gsm.
For £4.99 it’s definitely not cheap, and considering I bought three thinking it would be amazing I’m pretty disappointed to say the least. I saw this video that first introduced me to the pen and I would say that it’s quite misleading when it comes to the quality of the pen, they must have filmed a lot of re-takes to get that perfect take because mine never looks like their finished result. I don’t know if I just have a dodgy pen as I never have that much ink come through, hopefully my next pen will be better but personally, after my experience I would give this pen a miss. In the future I will be investing in a laser printer as I have plans for foil prints in my shop but for now I’ll get my printing done elsewhere. If you have a seriously steady hand when it comes to tracing things then this pen will be right up your street, however I sadly just don’t get on with it.
If you want to know more about the Heidi Swapp Minc Machine I will be writing a full review on that soon so keep your eyes peeled for that post.
Have you tried the Minc Toner Ink Pen?
Kiss & Make-up
That looks so preeeetty.
Claudia
Kiss & Make-upIt’s beautiful when it works! xx