FOBA 2026 - Brenda Gallager - Decorating With The Heat Foil Pen

Focus on Book Arts 2026

Brenda Gallager
Decorating With The Heat Foil Pen - Saturday & Sunday, June 27-28, 2026

Read more about FOBA 2026 on their website!
https://focusonbookarts.org/2026-foba-conference/

Workshop Description:

Create beautiful designs for your books with the heat foil pen. Each student will receive a brand new heated foil pen with multiple nibs that they can take home at the end of class. Brenda will provide a rainbow of foil options for students to use in class. Students will also be invited to cut a length of each color to take home for future projects

On day one, we’ll begin experimenting with the heated pen tool to learn which technique yields the best results. We’ll experiment on different materials: paper, book cloth, and leather. We’ll practice lettering, drawing shapes and designs, and layering multiple colors and patterns. Once students are confident with the heated pen tool, we’ll plan our final design for the finished book. In the afternoon we’ll make tracing paper templates of our final designs and create these in foil on the book cloth for our finished book.

On day two we’ll fold text-weight paper into signatures for our book. We’ll sew a multi-signature link-stitch text block, tip on colorful end sheet pages, consolidate the spine, add machined end band material, then make a flat-back case with our foil decorated book cloth. Finished text blocks will then be cased in to the decorative foil-embellished case. If time allows, additional designs can be added to the books after casing in.

Prerequisites (participants should know how to):

• Thread a needle and wax the thread
• Determine paper grain and match the grain of different components of a book
• Fold paper using a bone folder and assemble signatures
• Sew a kettle stitch
• Glue up paper or cloth to cover binder’s board
• Simple sewn text block for codex book

Materials/equipment to be provided by students:

• Bone folder
• Pencil
• Ruler
• Scissors
• Cutting mat
• Awl

Optional:

• Japanese Screw Punch with Multiple Bits