Glitter with a twist

Some of you might remember the fantastic glitter craft I made for my friend back in February. I really love this type of art as a fun, easy and personalized present idea.

When another close friend had her birthday a week or so ago, I decided to reprise the craft again. But I wanted to one up myself. I wanted to make the craft bigger, badder and better.

Years ago, I became really into embossing. Essentially, the process consists of putting a sticky material onto a stamp, stamping onto a surface, sprinkling embossing powder over the surface and heating the surface with an embosser until the special powder melts and becomes permanent. For my Bat Mitzvah, I spent hours in my basement hand embossing every name card with butterflies (naturally that was my theme). They looked totally professional (at least to my new-woman eyes) and were an affordable solution to an already expensive event.

Today, I decided to combine these two of my favorite things: Martha's glitter craft and embossing. I went through the same process as I used with the original craft. I found the perfect picture of my fantastic friends and uploaded the photo into Martha's glitter tool on her website at http://www.marthastewart.com/glitter-painting. Once the photo was converted into a PDF, I printed it and was ready to glitter emboss.

Instead of spreading particular swaths of the picture with glue, I spread it with embossing glue. This stuff is super sticky so of course I now have glitter all over my body, bedspread, stuck to my walls and coming out of my ears (ok, that last one is an exaggeration, but it really is everywhere). I worked with one swath of the photo at a time, each a different dress. I dumped plenty of embossing powder over the newly sticky area, dumped off the extra back into the powder container and heated the area with my embossing gun until the powder melted completely. In this fashion, I worked the photo in different colors.

To finish the photo off, I mounted it on card stock. I folded the card stock in half to make a super cute card that you can convert into a frame! I sent the card, along with some other Martha goodies to my friend who is all the way in the Caribbean working hard towards her Veterinarian degree. Although I would rather be with her lounging on the beach, I hope this package will bridge some of the gap. (Love you, Chlo!)

Materials/Extra Information

As I have Amazon Prime, I tend to get a ton of my stuff on Amazon. You can buy an embossing gun on Amazon for as little as $16 dollars. Any any old embosser will do; you don't need anything fancy to get the job done.

You can also buy embossing powder on Amazon, or at Joann's which is my personal favorite craft store. They aren't too expensive and are on sale a lot, which is awesome.