ICE

I can’t tell you how excited I am to be a member of the Crop Chocolate Design Team.  I was totally stunned and excited to receive this position . . . and a bit intimidated, but mostly excited.

Our theme for January is ICE . . . there are so many fun things you can do with ice, hut my mind immediately went to a picture of my oldest son's prom, which I had put off scrapbooking for a few years.  The theme of the prom was "What Dreams are Made Of" and the decorations were all snowy and icy.  The igloo in the background just sealed the deal.

This allows me to show you, what I think, is a really great technique.  Don’t you just hate it when you use glitter on a layout or card and the glitter flakes off every time you touch the card or look at the page?  Glitter is pretty, but I like it best when it stays in its place.  Well today I am going to show you how to use glitter and seal it so that it does not flake off.

To compliment my picture I chose to use Winterland paper by Fancy Pants throughout the layout.  I used the Below Zero for the background.   I cut letters and snow flakes using the Mistletoe design card with my Slice.  The glitter technique that I used with this layout is shown in the way I applied the glitter to the letters "DREAM" and to the snowflakes.  I wanted them to look icy, but not be messy.

In this picture, you will see I cut out letters, using Frigid paper for the words "What" and "are Made Of" and the Cards paper for "Dreams" and the snowflakes.

Now to adhere the glitter to the letters and snowflakes to give it an icy effect, I first sprayed the letters and snowflakes with Aleene's Tacky Spray and sprinkled with Hint of Violet Flower Soft Glitter.   The beauty of the Aleene’s Spray is that it dries very quickly.   After I shook the excess glitter off, I then sprayed the letters again with Mod Podge Gloss Lustre spray.   Again, this dries very quickly.    For this application, I think is much easier to use the spray instead of the brush on Mod Podge.    Using Mod Podge allows all of the beauty of the glitter to shine through, but not flake off.  I love this technique and it can be used with anything you want to glitter.

Below Zero paper is used for the background.  I attached the lettering "What" and "Are Made Of” which was cut from Frigid paper.  I also used Martha Stewart Snowflake punch and punched snowflake border on the top and bottom of a strip of Frigid paper and attached to the background paper above my photograph.   I used Electric Winter Transparency by Fancy Pants and attached the snowflakes and the letters "Dream" (cut from Snow Angel) with pop dots to give it some dimension and then placed this over the layout.  I also used a pretty mint green Pebbles Pearl Candy Dots to accent the snowflakes.

I hope you find this technique helpful in your future crafting.