A New Partner For My Chipboard

When I was recently offered the chance to try out a liquid laminating adhesive that I hadn’t played with before, I have to admit that I was skeptical. What could I find that was missing from my perfectly satisfactory relationship with the ubiquitous white liquid that it seems everyone uses? But to my pleasant surprise I learned that I had in fact been missing out on a few benefits by sticking (pun intended) with my good old reliable friend. And now I have a new tool in my bag of tricks for working with my other favorite new toy, chipboard.

Laminating adhesives are used for a variety of things by scrapbookers. Common uses at the moment include using them to cover chipboard embellishments with patterned paper and mount them, to assist in creating mini-albums using chipboard and 3D items, and to adhere paper to items that are being altered and to then seal those items.

Beacon Adhesives‘ Liquid Laminate comes in a squeeze top bottle that makes it less messy right from the start than its competition. It is easy to dispense the exact amount that you wish to use from the container without making a mess or wasting any adhesive.

The first big difference that I noticed about Liquid Laminate is that unlike the other popular laminating adhesive it comes out of the container clear, not white. While this did make it harder to see what you were doing when dispensing it and loading a brush, for instance, it made it less unnerving to use to me. If I did get a smudge somewhere it disappeared and dried almost immediately so that I didn’t feel like I was making a huge mess.

And speaking of messes, that is where the second obvious difference about Liquid Laminate comes into effect as well (or at least for me). The adhesive is thin, almost like water in consistency. To me this is an advantage over it’s thicker competitor. With thicker adhesive I always have a tendency to get too much on the item and then it oozes out the edges, causes wrinkles in lightweight items, and other problems. But with the water-thin Liquid Laminate, it is simple to not overload your brush or the item you are adhering. I was able to start using the exact correct amount of adhesive from my first use of the product, with no overage and oozing. This also makes it easy to stick a brush under an edge that didn’t adhere properly to add more adhesive without causing a mess.

There is a downside to the thin adhesive, however: it dries quickly! When you use Liquid Laminate you have to be decisive about where items are going and be accurate in placement because you don’t get much of a chance to move them once they are in place. With thicker adhesive that dries slower, you can adjust a bit before it sticks permanently.

The only other downside that I discovered to the Liquid Laminate was a tendency for it to cause curl when I used it on large flexible surfaces such as the chipboard pages of a mini-album. Perhaps that was my error in applying the adhesive, but the pages I was working on tended to curl after the paper was adhered to them and the adhesive dried. This didn’t happen when I used it on smaller items and I assume would not be an issue with stiffer items either.

All in all, Beacon Adhesives’ Liquid Laminate has a lot of advantages over its’ usual competition in the decoupage and laminating market. While it probably won’t entirely replace its predecessor in my adhesive stash, it will definately be the first option that I reach to for those adhesive tasks in the future.