A Bright and Shiny New Year

The birds blend two shades of glitter and the
 wings and heart are in different colors

New Year’s comes around more than once a year for me—I like fresh starts in January, in August for the school year, and again in October for my birthday. The January new year is my sparkling one.

As a Christmas gift to myself I got a set of 24 amazing fine glitters from Martha Stewart. These glitters had been in my radar for over six months. Of course I had a couple dozen glitters already in my inventory, but there were only three of the very fine variety. (Go ahead, you can smirk now).

The glitters

I set up the glitters in my studio and just looked at them for almost two weeks. I am mesmerized by sparkling things. I did some Internet research on projects and found awesome wall art that I want to do for my upcoming home purchase. The project was designed by Kari Tarr for a contest Martha hosted on the show. The video tutorial is way cool for this.

I have some fun ideas for glitter cards that play on this idea from the wall art, but for some reason I couldn’t even start with that…I broke open the package for Valentine cards. Two techniques are featured for these cards:

1. Covering an entire punched paper piece with glitter after running it through Xyron™ adhesive. (see birds above)

Stamped Image highlighted with glue pen and then glitter.

2. Use a glue pen to outline spots on a stamp image and filling them in with glue. (see heart on right)

Not exactly extravagant starting points, but I did enough to get glitter on my face. Tips from my in-studio session with fine glitters:

1. Use coffee filters to catch excess glitter and return to bottles. My non-stick craft sheets would have worked if they were clean—but seriously, they haven’t been clean in years. Same goes for my cute pink tidy tray for glitter.


2. Mix the colors on a punched object for depth and dimension.


3. Layer pieces of different colors on top of each other.

Design Notes--Valentine Flash Cards

Here's the full view of the cards shown in detail. I used K & Co. double sided print papers (on sale of course) to create these and the others shown below.

The first four cards done with double sided print paper and fine glitters.

A second set of cards with glitter and shiny hearts made from reclaimed note cards--more on that later.

Hat tipped to Michael’s Arts and Crafts for their great marketing over the holiday. They ran daily specials on one item and sent them out by email and phone alerts. The glitters were a one day only special that got me into the store and the phone alerts allow the cashier to scan a bar code on your phone and zip away with your purchase.