This is the second of two parts reviewing the YourStory Thermal Bookbinding and Laminating System by guest-blogger Sara Carns. Make sure you read part one, as well….
Now to laminating! Well, this part is pretty straight forward. One thing to make sure of is that you are working around a clean area. The plastic pages are very static, so if you have any cat hair, stray glitter or embossing powder, it will be attracted to the laminating sheets and get between your project. You can sit and laminate for quite a while before the machine needs to shut-off and cool down. My mother and I did a service project using two YourStory machines and didn’t run into any major problems with the laminating throughout the whole day.
The machine laminates great as long as you are doing no more than two thin layers of material. Chipboard embellishments are out of the question. Below, I took some scrap pieces of paper and cardstock, layered them and ran them through the YourStory. Around three layers of paper you start to see air between the plastic and paper. At five layers, you can bend the project and the laminating will actually come apart.
Now before I go any further into the article, I’m going to let you know what I consider to be the major flaw in this product and how I discovered it at an inconvenient time.
It was the Mother’s day after I had purchased the YourStory. I hadn’t used the kit that I had purchased with it originally and thought it would be nice to make my mother a binded photo book using the YourStory. I had an 8×8 kit from ProvoCraft which included supplies to put everything together and had also purchased what I thought were the 8×8 laminating sheets. I matted all of my photos onto solid cardstock and added them to the kit pages along with some of the alpha and embellishment stickers provided. I laminated a
I laminated all of the sheets with the YourStory and one of the pages totally came out wrinkled and gnarled. I wasn’t too happy with this. Well, I realized that since I had matted my photos and placed them on each side of the double-sided kit page, this was now five layers of paper I was laminating and that was pushing the machine to it’s laminating limits. Air pockets were forming between the layers of paper and a tight seal was not occurring.
Now came the big upset… I grabbed my provided book cover and put my laminated pages inside… Wait a second? My laminated pages overhang the book cover? I do a quick measure of everything and look at the packaging. The laminating sheets are actually 8.5†x 8.5†the books themselves are literally a hair over 8 inches; 8.06†in each dimension.
ProvoCraft recommends that you leave an 1/8th inch border around all sides of your laminated project to ensure a proper seal. This means I have to trim all of the sides of my laminated sheets to a hair thin 1/8th of an inch and it still hangs over the book. And once I did bind the book with the laminated pages, it was extremely rigid and difficult to even open and look through the book. This pretty much holds true to all of the sizes I’ve come across. The 8.5×11†book actually measures 8.65†x 11â€, meaning you could have NO laminated overhang. I have not purchased a 12×12 book so I couldn’t honestly say what it’s exact size is, but the binding section of the machine is 12 inches wide, so you would not be able to laminate and bind a book in the 12×12 size.
Now could you trim all of your photos and laminating sheets down to get a proper fit inside of the book? Absolutely, yes. But in my opinion, this takes away a lot of the convenience I was looking forward to with this machine. I really wanted to laminate AND bind books for my daughters to use and see and not have to worry about dirty fingerprints all over the photos inside. I feel that if ProvoCraft would have taken a bit more time in product testing and that if they simply made the covers a full inch bigger, they could have made this a much better and useable machine. And even still, the laminated pages, as I stated were rigid. So was this machine even intended in the first place to use the laminator and binding options together? I’ll let you all decide.
My four year old daughter Halle, loves laminating her own art work and she really enjoys being able to use one of mommies special crafting toys. I would say this is probably one of the best uses for the YourStory. Come on… look at that smile!
PROS:
- Lightweight
- Easy to store
- Easy to use
- Whisper Quiet
CONS:
- Not as “convenient” as portrayed
- Kind of Stinky
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theresa says
i purchased the provocraft yourstory. Can you use any type of card stock or paper?
hibiscus says
Hello friends,
I have a Provo Craft laminator/bookbinder and would like to find a group or community to join. Can any one help?