If you've ever wanted to add a beautiful wax-seal touch to a journal, envelope, or paper project — but without the actual wax — this tutorial is for you. I show how to make faux wax seals using a hot glue gun, a coin, and whatever images you love: stickers, dried flowers, stamped shapes, punched-out butterflies, even little numbers. The results are genuinely gorgeous, and because you can batch-make them ahead of time, you can have a whole stash ready to grab whenever a project needs that finishing detail.
What we cover
This tutorial walks through everything from the materials you need (including one clever trick that changed everything for me) through the full making process, a handful of variations using different glues and glitter, and finally a stack of project ideas — envelopes, journal covers, bookplates, clusters, paper packs — to get your own ideas moving.
What you'll learn
How to make a basic faux wax seal with hot glue and a coin, including:
- Applying glue starting from the centre and working outward in circular motions
- Using a chilled coin to get a clear, crisp image and prevent the coin from sticking
- Working with images that are slightly larger than your coin by centring carefully so the glue spreads evenly
Why chilling the coin matters — the difference between a room-temperature coin and a chilled one is striking. Without chilling, the image comes out cloudy and the coin often sticks to the glue, sometimes pulling the image apart. A few seconds on an ice pack is all it takes, and condensation on the coin isn't a problem at all — just press down anyway.
What to use as your "stamp" tool, including:
- Large coins (I use the largest Australian coins — good surface area)
- The flat bottom of skincare bottles or jar lids
- Shot glasses (as long as the base is flat, not indented)
What to use as your image, including:
- Stickers left on their backing (so the finished seal is already self-adhesive)
- Punched-out shapes
- Hand-cut images and stamped pieces
- Dried flowers — these are my absolute favourites, genuinely beautiful on anything with a vintage feel
- Small text stickers like "handmade with love" rolls
- Numbers and other graphic shapes with crisp, dark backgrounds
How to make a two-colour seal with a coloured border and clear centre, using two hot glue guns — one loaded with glitter or coloured glue for the edge, one with clear for the fill.
How to add glitter to your seals, including:
- Sprinkling glitter on top before the glue fully sets
- Brushing glitter off the image area and pushing it toward the edges with a small brush
- Pressing glitter into the sides of the seal as the glue seeps out
Why glitter hot glue sticks show the coin imprint less clearly — and why matte coloured sticks give you a much more visible image.
How to use clear hot glue for a clean, transparent seal — the image underneath shows through beautifully, especially with stamped pieces or stickers that already have good contrast.
Why these hot-glue seals outperform wax-crayon seals for pre-making — wax crayon seals look beautiful but they crack if bent and have to be done directly onto the project. These hot-glue ones are flexible, storable, and can sit in a bag until you need them.
How to batch-produce seals efficiently — keeping three or four coins on the ice at once, working through a pile of images quickly. I made 45 in about an hour one evening.
Project ideas for finished seals, including:
- Fabric envelopes with ribbon underneath the seal
- Journal covers
- Bookplates
- Paper clusters with lace, book pages, and postage stamps
- Little paper packs wrapped with a strip of scrapbook paper and a seal as the closure
Tips & gotchas
Chill your coin on an ice pack before you start — even just five seconds makes a real difference. The chilled surface gives you a sharper image and releases cleanly from the glue without sticking. I spent a long time puzzling over why my images were coming out cloudy before I worked this one out.
Always work on baking paper. Hot glue lifts right off it once set; without it you'll be wrestling your seals off the table.
Start the glue in the middle of your image and work outward in a circular motion. You don't need to fill in every gap — once you press the coin down, the glue spreads and fills in on its own.
If your image is slightly larger than your coin, that's fine — just make sure you centre the coin carefully so it pushes the glue outward evenly in all directions rather than to one side.
For glitter: if you want it on the edges but not over the image, brush the glitter away from the centre while the glue is still warm, pushing it toward the rim where the glue seeps out. That's where it catches best.
If you want to use coloured or glitter glue sticks for the whole seal, go for a matte finish if you can find it. Glitter glue lets the coin imprint show through a little, but a matte coloured stick gives you a much crisper result.
Wax crayon seals are worth knowing about as an alternative — they look genuinely beautiful and have an authenticity to them. But they can't be pre-made. They crack if the paper bends, and they need to be done directly on the project and left there. If pre-making and storing is part of your workflow, hot glue is the right material.
A seal on a folded paper pack, a dried-flower one tucked into an envelope cluster, a stamped number pressed onto a journal cover: small additions that just add another layer to whatever you're already making. Paired with the fabric envelope and wonky envelope tutorials (both linked in the video), you've got everything you need for complete, finished paper pieces that feel considered from end to end.
