 Well, hi there. It's Sandy Alnok and it's time for me to weigh in on the glue gun battles over wax seals, the pros and cons in my opinion. And I bought both a mini glue gun and a full size and the difference seems to be more in the size of the sticks that go in them than in the glue guns themselves. One is battery operated. The other is plugged into the wall. The one thing that matters is that you have a low heat setting when you use low heat setting with these. You splooge out a circle of wax and then take your stamp that has metal on the end that has your design in it and set it down. You don't even have to really use any pressure just set it down there and the weight of the stamp will usually press the design into it and after about 20 seconds peel it off and you've got a wax seal. So I wanted to do some testing and this seemed a perfect opportunity. Normally every quarter I send out 30, 40, 50 cards to my patrons to different ones of them and this time I thought well I've got 50 cards ready to go. Let me put a seal on each one and run some tests. So in addition to running glue gun tests I'm doing postal tests so I'll talk about the postal stuff later but right now I wanted to tell you my issues with glue guns because that's what this video is really all about and what I found was that the process of doing this was supposed to be faster than doing it with a spoon but if you don't cool the stamp in between it's not any faster and actually this turned out to really slow me down several times. The heat goes into that metal and then makes your stamp so that it pulls up the wax that's underneath of it and it can become a real mess. I did find that on some of them I could repair it with a heat gun just to melt that puddle of wax again and then use the cool stamp to go back into it and try to restamp. This one ended up not really pulling out very easily and then I did end up with a little goober on it because right by the end of the word you you can see there's a hole in there I think that was an air bubble of some kind but as a whole what I found was that the process of trying to cool down the dang stamp slowed everything because my glue gun was raring and ready to go it was just pouring out the wax it was all over the table I couldn't get it to stop it was you know I mean it wasn't pouring as if you were squeezing it but it was dripping really regularly and I was stressed out trying to figure out how the heck to cool the stamp down fast enough to keep up with the glue gun so while the glue gun can deliver it really fast you can't stamp it that fast my recommendation would be not to have all of your mass production of these done with the same stamp I mean you could have different varieties of stamps so that you could take turns and they'd have time to cool off in between that is a possibility or if you're trying to use a monogram stamp like if you're doing wedding invitations or something then have a couple of the monogram stamps made so you can trade off between them if speed is an issue because otherwise it's just frustration at least from my perspective that's what I found and while I was doing this I missed the whole sitting there watching the wax melt in the spoon I realized that's part of what I love about wax seals is just watching it happen so this just seemed like a very mechanical way to do something that was not intended to be a mechanical process it's me it's intended to be very very handmade so there's that issue that I have with glue guns but also the second thing that makes me not want to use them for this is I can't change colors per seal like when I do one thing I want to have a red seal when I do something else maybe I want to have a teal seal on another I want to have a gold and another one to have a silver and with a glue gun you can't change colors out that easily you have to either wait till you use it up and just do a whole bunch of the same ones or when you're changing then there's going to be a transition in color because you're going to have still some of the gold stuck in the gun while you're pushing a red stick into there and you're going to have an opportunity for them to mix in the middle you won't get one color or the other and you can end up I would think losing a lot of wax along the way so for me this is not the solution to trying to get faster with this I don't know if there is a solution or if that's even my goal to get faster but I do know that glue guns are not something I want to use when I do my wax seal work so please don't look forward to getting any of the glue gun wax seals in my future videos because I will be relaxing and using my candle well let's get on to the other testing that I was doing while working on this project the first test was postage and what that was going to cost I had a feeling these were going to be the extra 20 cents that was not a question in my mind necessarily but I wanted to be sure and the clerk told me that yes they would be 20 cents extra for domestic and 21 cents for international and so I sat there we put stamps on all of these and as we got to a few of them he said wait a minute this one was thick enough that it would have already required 20 cents so he said technically I should put an extra 20 cents on it and the look on my face probably told him I did not want to do that I did not want to pay an extra 40 cents to mail a card and he said you know we can let it go and it might arrive postage due on the other end it really depends on who handles it between where we were standing at that moment and where the recipient is and whatever postal workers were in between there might decide that this one needed the extra 20 cents beyond that and there was no way to really know so I decided to let them all go as is the time of the recording of this audio I have had no reports of anybody having to pay the extra 20 cents to get their card out of the post office so apparently so far no one has decided that the extra 20 cents was required however I paid for all of the hand machining of these I paid the extra 20 cents which should have meant all of the wax seals should have arrived in good condition right this is the second part of my test what would these seals look like when they got there and I've gotten a few pictures of some abysmally wrecked seals like they really went through the ringer this one looks like there's something that just went right through the center of it I don't know what happened I don't know what machine it got stuck in but it was not enjoying itself clearly it's not having a good day okay fine this one just looks like something got sheared off somehow I'm not really sure what happened there but as of the date of this recording those are the only two that had any damage to them not everything has arrived though and any others that arrive with weird things happening to them I will post pictures on the blog post that's linked in the doobly-doo down below this video so if you want to go see them you can and of course if there's any updates on extra postage that anybody had to pay I will add that to the blog post as well I've noticed on a bunch of the websites of the higher end wax seal companies that they'll say things like you should put your card in an envelope and put the seal on that and then put that envelope inside another envelope and yes you can certainly do that and it's going to cost you not only the extra 20 cents but it's going to cost you an extra envelope which is why I have been looking for ideas and ways to use wax seals on cards as embellishments so that they're within the context of the embellishing and the lumpiness that we already create in our cards rather than putting it on the outside where it's going to cause extra postage and extra potential damage and stuff so keep an eye on my YouTube channel for more of that in the future in coming months there is a playlist that I will link in the doobly-doo down below so you can catch all of my wax seal videos in one spot so that's it for me thank you for clicking the like button on the way out and for engaging in the glue gun battle if that is what you choose to do you can choose to use a glue gun I'm choosing not to and I will see you later on have an awesome awesome day bye bye