In the run up to Christmas I try very hard to do some kind of Christmas crafts with the children every day to make it feel special. This year we have chosen to have a ‘handmade’ Christmas as much as possible, so far we have made some Christmas decorations, Christmas cards and today we made our very own Christmas placemats for the dinner table using our Fellowes Callisto A3 Laminator we were sent as part of the SmART Attack Challenge. You may remember seeing our fun earlier in the year with the Fellowes Paper Shredder.
I love laminating, I remember when I was at school I would laminate anything if it sat still long enough and then when I started out in my working career the laminator used to sit in my office and once again I was laminating anything and everything, there’s just something extremely satisfying about how shiny and professional things look once they have been sandwiched and sealed into the laminating pouches.
For our placemats I showed the tiddlers how to make snowflakes, so we made them in varying shapes and sizes. Hubby even joined in and made a rather odd shaped snowflake?!?! Once we had finished all our cutting out we arranged the snowflakes onto gold and silver paper in the laminating pouches and then I cut up Christmas parcel ribbon and scattered it randomly over the snowflakes in preparation for the final seal.
The Fellowes Callisto laminator is an impressive looking piece of kit and I love that it is able to laminate up to A3 although sadly it was only supplied with 10xA4 pouches. Once plugged in and switched on there are four heat settings for the laminator dependant upon the thickness of the items you wish to laminate. I tried laminating a couple of snowflakes initially with no backing paper but this turned out to be a bad idea because the pouches curled over on the corners when it came out of the other side and cooled that way. I did pop them back through the laminator the other way to straighten them out but it did still leave a crease. Once I added the backing paper to the inside of the pouch I received perfect results every time and I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with our creative wares today.
What would you do if you had a laminator?
DISCLAIMER: We were sent the Fellowes Callisto A3 Laminator for the purpose of this post. All words, images and opinions are my own and may not be copied without my permission. I have not been instructed what to write.