smARTworks challenge

This week's smARTworks challenge was just to make something with glitter. Glitter? I never use glitter! Wait, I did get a free set of pink ultrafine glitters a few years ago with an order, and I never opened it. Hmmm...okay, I'll try it.

Well, I'm happy with the final result, but it may be a looooong time before I use it again. Whether it's the age of my heat and stick powder (two or three years?), the glitter, or not enough wetness in my pigment inks, I had difficulty getting the glitter to stay. I also had forgotten how messy glitter is ... I used three different shades of pink glitter, trying to find the one that would make the nicest contrast with the three inks I was using. So, glitter everywhere! :-)

Just as I finished the ferns (attempt #7!), and had put embossing powder on the dragonflies, my heat gun died! I'd had it for many years, had used it to strip our porch and an old door, not to mention countless embossing projects, so it had lived a full life! I have an old cheapie heatgun which is barely alive (quite using it when smoke was pouring out of it, but saved it for emergency use), so I managed to complete the embossing of the dragonflies. However, the gun heats so slowly, that by the time silver embossing powder has been melted, it has flattened into the cardstock. So, the images are a bit blurred. It actually worked better that way; I wanted to add just a bit of color to the wings, and this made the color more subtle.

I love how the glitter looks! I was really surprised, perhaps, as I discovered when photographing the card, that's because I've only seen online cards with glitter, and photos just don't do glitter justice. Also, what looks light white ferns really is a light pink; it was too subtle for the camera to pick it up.