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Reported By: Heather Strenzwilk
Have you ever heard of Royal and Langnickel aka Royal Brush? I hadn't until my mom gave me a few of their Create-A-College rub-on sets. A short time later, I discovered the wide variety of their products at a chain craft store. In addition to vintage collage are alphabets, words, holidays, and scrapbook themes. Royal Brush offers various styles including glow in the dark, metallics, minis, translucent and glitter rub-ons.I wanted to try a variety of their product line so for my projects I purchased Fun Flowers Glimmer (1470G), Girl Power (1436), and Leaf Accents 2 (950GD). I also did some testing with Flowers 2 Alphabet (1433H), Birthday Words (1426H), Ladies Collage (525) and Postcard Collage (500).
According to the package: "Royal E-Z Rub-On Transfers apply quickly and easily to any surface using the stick provided in the package. Decorate walls, glass, windows, mirrors, plastic, wood, candles, metal, paper, clay pots, ceramic, scrapbooks, photo albums, leather, greeting cards and paper gift bags." The rub-ons did work on the many surfaces I tried but definitely released easier on glossier surfaces.Rub-ons in general are easy to use and these were no exception. One of the advantages is the ability to place them anywhere including a curved or non-flat surface. They are easily portable and don't require any special tools or glues to make them stick (but they do require elbow grease!)
My biggest issue with these rub-ons (as with all rub-ons) is that the "transfer stick" is a Popsicle stick. It is clumsy to hold and if you rub too hard, you could damage your surface or the rub-on. I much preferred using a bone folder for burnishing the designs. The bone folder glides much smoother and is easier to hold.
I liked the variety of sheets available- there were many different styles to suit a variety of tastes. Several of the alphabets came in larger sizes on a full sheet and had separate companion "minis" with smaller, lowercase versions of the alphabet. This would be a great help to spell words or names. The full alphabet sheets also had numbers and punctuation while the minis had letters only.
Royal Brush color codes their packaging which I found helpful. For example, the metallic foils are silver and the glimmers are green. I found this helpful because some of the flower sets had glimmer and non-glimmer versions which were very similar. Additionally, they provide a small thumbnail of the sheet on the package front.
My local craft store didn't carry the seasonal styles, but they are available for order from the Royal Brush website. Unfortunately, there were styles on the website that didn't have a photo available. The website is easy to navigate and offers several ways to search including product number, style and category.

I liked that these rub-ons are readily available in chain craft stores. Prices ranged from 99 cents to $2.99 and the craft store I was at had them on sale for an additional 25% off. They were a great value for the price and one sheet would definitely be enough to make several cards or scrapbook pages.
I have used rub-ons by K & Company, Miss Elizabeth, Making Memories and Creating Keepsakes in the past. For their large variety of designs and styles, color coded packing and easy to use website- I give these Royal Brush rub-ons above average ratings. The rub-ons applied smoothly and I was happy with the quality of the product. The regular rub-ons were the easiest to apply but the finished products using the metallic and glitter styles were well worth the extra burnishing!
Have you tried the Royal Brush rub-ons? Leave us a comment and let us know what you thought!







3 Comments:
I've used the Royal Brush rub-ons, and was quite disappointed them them. That's very sad because they have great images that I love. My biggest complaint is that their image is not as easy to come off of the sheet as they claimed. It will stick, but you have to rub either really hard or for a long time before the image will transfer. That's not the worst part, the worst part is that you can't tell if it had released from the sheet, and when you lift, you can easily tear the image apart. Like I said, I love their image, but since I can't get them to transfer easily, I also gave up on the product. I have the exact flower one as shown on this post and used it for a Mother's Day card, and because I was rubbing so hard to get the image off, the card cratered where the images are. That's just not pretty over all. No go in my book.
I've used these rub-on quite extensively. The sentiment rub-ons are the easiest to use. The Royal and Langnickel shimmer rub-ons I find extremely difficult. Using an empressor stylus seems to help. I agree...I love the images and all their rub-on lines but they are NOT the easiest to transfer.
I have only tried the collage rub-ons and they were really, really hard to work with. Most just didn't transfer at all. Very disappointing.
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