love-a-duckie: All that glitters

We had great fun this afternoon at the Love-a-Duckie craft group, which is held every Monday afternoon in Tesco's Community Room at Victoria Park, Wellingborough. We were playing with Stampin' Up's heat and stick powder.You use it like an embossing powder; first stamping the image in Versamark ink, before sprinkling on the white, quite coarse powder. When heating it with the heat gun you have to be careful not to overheat it, just long enough for it to change from white to a clear tacky adhesive. You are then able to add bling. Stampin' Up do some pretty glitter in gold, silver and dazzling diamond. However, like many of us, over the years I have collected a myriad of colours in glitter and we delved into my box to see what we could find. The swallowtail butterfly was covered in a rose pink,whilst the peacock was suitably adorned in blue.

The fern from the butterfly basics set was also given the glitter treatment.

The main image was sprinkled with a holographic glitter which gave it a green tint on the black card. The glitter border was created by first laying down a border of double sided tape and then covering with blue glitter. I added an embossed background to this card, using the new boho chic folder. The sentiment also came from the Butterfly Basics stamp set.

To ring the changes, I again used the same fern stamp, but I dug back into my stash and found some gilding flakes. Unfortunately Stampin' Up don't stock these pots of loveliness, but they gave us the heat and stick which allowed us to play with them.

On this Gold colored fern,I added the mesh image from the Butterfly basics set and embossed it with gold embossing powder. I drew a border with the gold and silver pens which are now retired.

For the background on this silver fern, I inked the decorative dots embossing folder with versamark, before running it through my big shot.I then sprinkled on the heat and stick, heated it and added gilding flakes.

My little pot of heat and stick went a long way and I can see it be used a lot as we start to think about Christmas projects.

I also think it is good to remind ourselves that our Stampin' Up products are fabulous on there own, but they can also help us to breathe new life into things that are sitting at the back of our craft cupboards.