Showing posts with label glitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label glitter. Show all posts

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Experimenting with Glitter Ornaments

How cool is that!
I've been filling clear glass and plastic ornaments with glitter using Mop & Glo floor wax as the adhesive.  I bought a giant pack of Martha Stewart's glitter.  This one to be exact:

I like the solid colored balls such as these:


but I decided to try mixing it up as I did with the painted balls such as this on in previous years.

Here are some of the results.
This is with two colors dropped in carefully on each side before
shaking.    I used a funnel at first as most tutorials suggest,
 but found that the glitter drops in pretty neatly with the bottle
 top off.

This had  a number of colors placed in separately.
 I like the swirl that resulted.

This had much more of the purple with another color.
Again.  I put them in separately.

Then I took the bottles with just a bit of glitter left and shook them together in a bottle before putting the glitter in to see how that would work.  Here are a few of those:




These look much better than they appear in the pics.  Some of these are just two colors.  Others are a mix of four or five that show clearly up close.

I was a bit worried about doing this with the plastic balls, but they worked out great.  They have some give when you press on them, but the glitter stays on perfectly.  

Some tips:  
  • Mop & Glo works great!  I found that rolling the wax around for a minute, draining it completely, and putting the glitter in  immediately provided much better adhesiveness than letting the wax sit even for a short time. 
  • Very fine glitter works best.  I'm sure it doesn't need to be Martha's.  Martha does, however, have the best color choices.  Michael's and Joann's carry it.  With their coupons, you can get it for a great price. Of course, if someone knows of another company with 24 colors including lapis lazuli, peridot, yellow barite, and fire opal, I'd love to know about it.
  • I found that letting the finished balls sit for a half an hour before putting the tops on  carefully was sufficient.  I didn't have one incident of glitter being scratched off.  
I'm feeling a need to get back to making more sock creatures now.  Hopefully I will be able to  post about that soon!

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Review of Martha Stewart's Glitter Glue: Two Thumbs Down (both mine, of course)

I love glitter.  Actually I love almost all shiny things.  I must have been a raccoon in a former life.  Consequently, it was inevitable that I would try Martha Stewart's glitter.  I got the 24-pack of small bottles in all the colors for half price at Michael's.  Who could resist that?  I want to put glitter inside the clear glass ornaments.  Two problems with that.  I can't find the ornaments or the Future floor wax suggested by many people for adhering the glitter.  The next best thing was to try some glitter in my art journaling.

I bought Martha's glitter glue which looks exactly like the thick craft paste I used in elementary school; the one with the brush attached to the inside of the top.  It worked just like the old-fashioned paste, too.  The paste was difficult to get out with the brush.  As you move the brush around, the paste (or as Martha says, glue) moves to the sides of the bottle and stays there.  The "glue" also wrinkles the paper just as the elementary school paste did.  You end up with a stiff, bubbled, warped piece when it dries.  Did the glitter adhere?  Kind of.  Maybe with practice it would be better.

I also bought the ballpoint-tip glue pen.  It has a squeezy area in the middle so that you can get the glue out when you need it.  It says, "permanent bond when used wet; let dry clear for a temporary bond."  What does that mean?  I'm still not sure.  I think it means that it remains sticky if there are spots that don't have glitter and that that glitter will come off pretty easily.  I know it means that my journal pages will stick together if the glitter comes off.  I'm sure I should not use it in my art journal.    Also, after using it a short time, I could no longer get a uniform amount to flow.  That is a problem with lettering.  Perhaps someone with patience could get this to work.

All in all, The glitter is superb.  It is ultra fine.  The colors are magnificent.  Martha's glue?  Any money I saved on the glitter I lost on the full-priced pen and paste.  (It's paste, Martha, paste!  Thick, clumpy paste!) Both are in the trash can. My end result was five sticky, warped pages with uneven thicknesses of glitter.  Had I been glittering a picture of a dog, it would have appeared to have a bad case of mange.  I've had pages warp a bit from other media.  I'm okay with a bit of that. These pages were not even salvageable. (BTW, I didn't DO five pages.  It's just that the paste/glue was wet enough to soak through making the pages lumpy.)

I'm pretty sure with all the reviews I've seen that the Future floor was will work on the ornaments, but I'm going to have to do some research to find a way to use this glitter for anything else.