Punchies

Here is the post showing my Mantle snowflakes, and the Christmas explosion that goes with it, and my poor old dog wondering what happened.  Using my Cricut Expression I made huge snowflakes from white paper, and holographic dollar store papers to hang above the mantle for the winter season.  They really were pretty because they were so simple.  I just came across the "waste paper" in my stash.  Funny the things that are squirreled away that turn up.  My inner crow was rejoicing, mmmmm, shiny!  Now, what to do with it?

An old tip is to punch scraps into shapes so the last bits truly are trash.  I follow Lindsey, "The Frugal Crafter" on YouTube, and she recently made a video diy-paper-sequins-without-a-fancy-die".  I wanted to try.  A friend gave me her hole punch and it was handy so I tried it.  I soon gave up poking holes into them, it was too time intensive for not much difference on such busy paper. 

Working on fun foam with a lowly click pen to push into the centre of each punchie yielded perfect sequin like cups.  So I got brave and dug out a little bitty dollar store flower punch, just as cute if not cuter.  The upper half of each picture shows them pen poked, the bottom half shows them flat.  I didn't bother poking them all, many remained flat.

So I punched,

and punched, and punched, and punched...  Look how they'd make cool eyes!

Then I thought, no need to mess around with glue.  Just stick them to 3/18" glue dots.  Except at first I didn't.  At first I messed around with Liquid glass, bubbles of it, just waiting, begging for cat intervention.  Thankfully they were not investigated by any cat people and the experiment progressed.  I put a dot of liquid glass on a few, others got completely covered with it.  When they were dry, they looked remarkably like pre-made glitter products, like these glitter gems, that are faceted, but not the same since my knock offs are smooth bubbles.

When will I learn, natural daylight isn't quite enough.  Sorry about the blueish hue, I promise that it was a bright and sunny day when I photographed these.

So I got smarter and put the punchies on the glue dots, THEN put the liquid glass on them in small and large bubbles.  Aren't they pretty?  The best part is, I have lots to play with, and they cost me almost nothing, and I gained 2 hours playing around in my craft room. 

Thanks for stopping by!