 Well hey there, it's Sandy and I'm going to do a quick video today finishing up some card backgrounds, turning them into cards with some wax seals. And I'm using supplies that I got from Altenew. Several people have said, hey, have you tried the Altenew stuff? How does it compare to some of the other brands you've used? And a lot of it is identical and you'll be able to kind of see how. So they sell both the beads and the sticks and they also sell stamps. This Hello Stamp is quite pretty. I really like it and I'm probably going to use that quite a bit. But the backgrounds I am using from a previous video. You may remember this one where I was testing out some watercolors and did some doodling on top of it just because that was way more fun than just making plain old boxes. And then I ended up with all these backgrounds. So I made a whole pile of cards. I'm just going to show you a few here. But in order to put the wax seal on here, if I had dropped it directly onto this watercolor paper, I kind of would have ended up not being able to see much of it because the background is so busy. So I wanted to simplify it. So I took a little bit of liquid adhesive. This is the Lawn Fawn one and put some right where the wax seal is going to go. Picked out my spot for it and then put a piece of vellum over it. You can use the heavy weight or the light weight. And this is the light weight. If you use the heavy weight, you might not need to put glue at the top or on the corners. But I put just the tiniest dot in the corners, smushed it out with my finger a little bit and then pressed it on top. But using a different finger, don't put the glue on top. And that was enough to hold it in place by the time I finished everything else I was doing. I taped a little piece of thread. And this is just normal sewing thread, but you can also use embroidery floss. You can get it in matching colors that match whatever is in your background. I just wrapped it around a bunch of times, three, four, five times, made them all kitty wampus because it's a very modern design in the background. So it kind of warrants having a looser type of design for the strings and then use some dimensional adhesive to pop it on a card. Then I took some of the wax beads and the wax stamp got it ready by putting some of the tape onto the thing so I can see where the straight line is at the top and the bottom. And once my wax was melted in the spoon, I melt it in a warmer over a candle. You could just hold it in a regular old spoon over top of a candle if you want as well. Pour the wax onto the strings themselves right in that spot where my glue was, so it covers that up. And then take the stamp, line up my tape so I can get it kind of straight and splooge. You don't have to press really hard, usually just the weight of the stamp will make that impression. Leave it on there for 10, 15, 20 seconds, something like that. Different wax will be able to be lifted in different amounts of time. So sometimes you'll need to test out a few and see how it goes. And then voila, you have your finished stamp with a little hello message on it. So I'm going to do the same thing with each one of the others. I've just picked out colors that go with them. Now this is one of the wax sticks and you might call it a wax candle because it does have a wick in it. As you can see, I've cut a piece out so I can put it into my spoon to heat it up because I don't want to use the wick. Now it's possible to just light the candle on fire and let the wax drip out onto your paper. But what I find is it doesn't drip fast enough. The stuff on the paper ends up drying and hardening before I get enough into the puddle to squish it. So that's one problem. The other problem is you get soot from the fire in the wax and then your wax ends up with little black marks in it. So that doesn't seem to function as well as I wish it would. So I just cut off a chunk of it. But I cut off a chunk, not letting that wick go into the wax that I'm going to be melting. And I did the same thing with each one of these. Just cut off a little piece so that I could melt it in the wax warmer in the spoon and then pour it out onto the card. A few folks have been asking if the Altenew wax seal supplies are better or worse than some of the fancy art companies that I have been purchasing from. Because I like to purchase the high end of things and the low end and get an idea of what that range is. What is the difference between a good high end art product and a crafty product? And it's more than price. It's a lot in performance. Here you can see two sticks. The one on the right is Altenew. The one on the left is a cheapy from Amazon. And they look like they're made by the same company. They both perform the same. Same deal with the little hexagon beads that I showed you earlier. Those look like they're cut by the same machines. You can see the striations in the lines. So I think they're all made by the same companies wherever they are in the universe. That sort of thing. Altenew makes craft quality things so that they can be affordable for you. That's the reason they do it because they want you to be able to make lovely things, but not break the bank. So that is where they fall on the lower craft end of things, not in the high fancy end. But that hello stamp is one that I'm going to use a lot. It's going to look really gorgeous with the fancier waxes. Here you can see striations in the wax and that is a function of the wax quality. But it certainly looks fine to me on a card. I don't think it's anything worth dissing. If you want to try wax seals, they're perfectly fine to use for cards. So that is what I have to say about that links in the doobly due to the supplies as well as a playlist. If you want to see more on wax seals and I'm going to go. I think I've been talking at you really fast today. I'll see you later. Bye guys.