Hey, Daisies! Today I am here to shine the spotlight on a favorite product - rub-ons! As a design team member, I receive almost all of the Cocoa Daisy kits each month, and this month, there were THREE sets of rub-ons to play with (in the Pocket and Travelers Notebook Memory Keeping kits, as well as the Planner Add-On kit). With so many beautiful images, I just had to try out a bunch of ways to use them. Let's talk first about a couple of tips for using the rub-ons successfully.  The first tip is actually from Christine herself, and when I saw this tip, I had a "Duh!!" moment - like, why didn't I think of this myself?  She suggests that you staple the clear front sheet to the backing sheet to keep them from coming apart all over the place as you start to cut the rub-ons out of the sheet: When I first implemented this tip, I stapled in two places on the top of each sheet; but the more I used the rub-ons, I ended up cutting the sheets into two or more pieces; the stapled half stayed together, but the unstapled half came apart.  So then I also started stapling the bottom edge as well...and then the sides too, haha.  At the end of the day, I just wanted my sheets to stay together, and I have to say, this is one of the best tips ever.  It works like a charm! Now, let's start using these babies! This month, inspired by a friend who is also a Cocoa Daisy customer, I started the month off using brown cardstock for my weekly pages.  The first week, I used stickers like I normally do, but the white paper of the stickers felt jarring to me on the brown background.  Enter the rub-ons! I think what I love most about them is that they end up looking like they're printed on the page, no matter what color paper you use, but man, do they pop on the dark cardstock! Here is how the whole week ended up looking, and I have to say I just adore it. Except for the washi, date dots, and white pen, this is all rub-ons: I love how the rub-ons look on my planner pages so much that I wanted to try them out on the vellum and acetate to see how they'd do.  First up, the vellum and another tip - use tweezers! I use craft tweezers in two ways when I'm using rub-ons: first, to help place the rub-on after it's been cut out. If I lay it down on the page and then try to move it, I run the risk of a bit of the design coming off before I want it to.  Tweezers help me place them so I can lay it down just right the first time: Now, if you've used rub-ons before, you know that the hold-your-breath moment is when you peel up the plastic and look to see if it transferred properly.  And if it didn't, it can be tricky to lay the plastic back down and line it up just right so that you can transfer whichever part didn't come off properly.  Here's the second place the tweezers come in handy - I hold the plastic sheet down on one side with one hand, and use tweezers in the other hand to lift up the other side and see if the transfer worked.  If not, I just release the tweezers, and the plastic is still in position because of how I am holding it with my other hand. This usually works like a charm, but sometimes, no matter what you do, part of the rub-on just doesn't want to come off the plastic sheet. For me, it's the skinny lines that are usually part of words or phrases, like this Hakuna Matata design.  (Definitely user error, haha!) A hack I use is to grab one of my permanent fine-tipped pigment liners and just freehand it.  Is it perfect? No.  But will it do for what I need? Absolutely!

I was kind of excited to see how well the rub-ons worked on the vellum, so I decided to try it on the acetate, too. And I have to say, it did not disappoint! Here are both experiments together, and I really love how they turned out.¬† These would make great bookmarks! One thing I will note - the images are easy to scratch off the vellum and acetate, probably because they're smoother than paper, so I would probably laminate these sheets before I use them. I hope you enjoyed reading about my rub-on usage this month, and I hope you've gotten some ideas for your own rub-on use.¬† If you have any other tips or hints, please leave them in the comments below - I'd love to know what you're doing with this awesome product! For more inspiration, you can find me on Instagram or join us in the Cocoa Daisy Fan Page group on Facebook. See you next month! xoxo Kristine