Iron Craft Challenge #18--Glittery and Shiny

The challenge for this version of Iron Craft was Shiny, Shiny. When I first read the challenge, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. In one of the first years of Iron Craft, Kat made Snowflake Gift Ornaments.  In one of her Advent Calendar challenges, she made glitter initials. I was waiting for just the right occasions to make a similar project.

The projects for this challenge were actually three separate projects because I wanted to play with some different materials. I have noted my aversion to glitter in previous posts because they are tiny living organisms that refuse to go away. Regardless on how careful you are, glitter get into everything in sight. I have found glitter on the bottom of my socks and the laundry service has actually found glitter in my underwear--which makes for pretty funny conversations when I go to pick up my laundry when it is done.

Mirror Snowflake

Project #1--Mirror Snowflake.
I have made snowflakes in three different sizes: small, medium and large. The largest snowflake was cut from mirror card stock. As mentioned yesterday, this card stock is made from a colored reflective film that is laminated on 35lb card stock. This card stock does not do well with curved cuts but does fine with the straight cuts of the snowflake. Since the back of the card stock is white, this would make a nice oversized gift tag. Here, I have attached the snowflake on a plainly wrapped gift box that has been wrapped in non-decorated silver wrapping paper. The only limitation of this effect is the limited colors of the card stock. Unfortunately, the picture does not show the reflective nature of the card stock.

Glitter Initial

Project #2--Glitter Initials
For this project, I cut out a very large version of an initial out of glitter paper. The paper is easy to cut--although it is easier to cut on the reverse side (therefore, the initial has to be reversed when cutting). There are a variety of nice glitter papers out there and I just happened to get mine on sale from Target. The only negative about this project is that this paper is not card stock. Because of the thin nature of the paper, I decided to glue the glitter initial directly to the wrapping paper.

Glitter Snowflakes

Project #3--Glitter Snowflakes
This was the original intent of the challenge all along but since I am already preparing for the holidays, I decided to experiment with materials and get practice done while preparing for the Iron Craft Challenge. These are the medium and small versions of the snowflake in Project #1. Here I have used ultra-fine glass glitter to cover the ornaments. For illustrative purposes, I decided to simply use Christmas red and Kelly green for this project. Here the snowflakes are attached to the wrapped box with baker's twine. The base of the snowflake is made from 35 lb black card stock. I used spray adhesive to set the glitter. Once dry, I spray the glitter snowflakes with fixative to prevent the glitter from getting loose. If you use a metallic pen, you can use these as gift tags or in this case, use them as ornaments.

In a future post, I will share with you lessons learned from my glittering attempts and products that I used to get these beautiful snowflakes.