Adhesives and Sticky Stuff

Now that I have enough items that I am happy with I need to find things to put them on. Everything I made needs to be mounted or adhered to some other product to make it seem useful since the photo fresco items that I make don't have a purpose on their own. I have been working on putting the emblems on mesh trucker hats and that's worked out pretty well using E6000 glue and applying pressure to the item on the hat for 6-12 hours. Epoxy has also worked and the final effect is a sort of inset style with the emblem appearing to be pushed down into the hat itself which makes it look more official. Pictures to come. I am also testing the different glues that I have been using to stick these emblems on other things like phones, wine bottles and coffee cups. In some cases I see these emblems being used as car or skateboard stickers, but they have to be able to weather the elements. I don't think there is a problem with the weathering effects as that should only add to the character of each of the emblems, but the life of the product will only be as good as the adhesive that is used to put the items on a car or skateboard. I have been putting an adhesive backed vinyl sticker onto the epoxy pieces, which is the same quality of sticker that is used for a bumper sticker. I have also been painting on a pressure sensitive adhesive with a layer of adhesive backed paper that can be removed prior to the adhesion of the emblem to a surface. My epoxy emblems can bend with the addition of heat from the sun, hand or a blow dryer, so that makes it able to bend around a curved surface like a trunk lid of a car or a bottle. In the case of the coffee cup I filled the cup with hot water and applied tape around the cup to hold the emblems in place while it cools. Hopefully the curvature of the heated emblem will remain as it cools and then the adhesives can do their job of holding the molded shape to the cup. This type of emblem is not microwave safe since it has metal in the emblem, but I can make a batch of colored emblems or spray painted emblems to fix that problem if the adhesives work. My current experiment with these emblem stickers is on a wine bottle with the two types of pressure sensitive adhesives. I let the bottle sit outside for a couple of days and now I have submerged it in soapy water and am letting it sit for an hour to see if the emblems pop off. I've put a decent amount of scrubbing to the bottle and the paper stickers are slowly dissolving. Any emblem will eventually come off with enough abuse, but for normal wear and tear for an inexpensive easy to apply item, this should be a sufficient test. I suppose I should also freeze the bottle and then bury it for a few days just to give it a true measure of abuse. The final test can be to hand it to my kids, they can break anything.