Sparkly Altoid Boxes

My love for Altoid tins prompted me to embellish some empty ones that I saved. I tend to be a craft supply “pack rat” and for awhile now I’ve had a small stash of empty Altoid tins just waiting to be decorated. After patiently anticipating their rejuvenation, the Altoid tins finally had their chance to sparkle and shine.

First I spray painted the tins with some leftover antique gold paint. Then I added some glittery touches using the Designer Dries Clear Adhesive & a variety of Art Glitter colors. For the box pictured, I started to make a few random circles with the adhesive and sprinkled one color of glitter over the wet adhesive. Next I let the first set of glittery circles dry. Once they were dry, I made a new set of random circles with the adhesive & glitter. I continued this process until I had random circles across the tin cover in colors of T-Bird (#184), Jamaica (D30) and Siren (D28). I wanted to add just a little more glimmer, so I used Crazy Corn (#D1) to fill in the space between the circles. As one last touch, I used Glossy Accents by Ranger, to apply over the circles.

I liked using the Art Glitter Dazzlers line of glitter for this Altoid tin project. The pieces of glitter in the Dazzlers are larger, and they worked well with the circle shapes on the tin cover. Using the T. Bird (#184) Ultrafine Pearlescent glitter for some of the other circles added some glittery contrast to the larger, more sparkly Dazzlers colors of Siren and Jamaica. I also liked how the Dazzler color, Crazy Corn (D1) had a combination of large pieces of glitter with ultrafine pieces of glitter. And the fact that the ultrafine glitter used in the Crazy Corn is in a red and a gold color, giving it a look of depth and warmth. Using the Crazy Corn color in the background on the tin helped to unify the Dazzlers colors of Siren & Jamaica, with the Ultrafine Pearlescent color of T. Bird. After using the Crazy Corn, it has proven to be one of my favorite colors to use. I never tire of seeing how fascinating the sparkles look in the Crazy Corn glitter. And it’s hard to resist adding it to all the rest of my pieces. You are sure to see Crazy Corn used again in at least one of my future projects. Don’t miss it!

Another bright idea for biz cards!

I'm always trying to find ways to make some tasks a little bit easier and economical. That doesn't always happen, but one area where I've found some ways to save some time and money is by using business cards for other purposes than "a business card." Last year I blogged about how I used biz cards as merchandising tools for my pins and magnets.

I make some of my sculptures from re-purposed burned out light bulbs.

Click here to see my Recyc-a-lite scultpures

Well, I've also thought of a way to use business cards for tags for some of my products. I try to include some type of info about what my product is and the name of the "collection/series" it belongs to. And then on the back of the card I leave room to write an item number/description/price. Using these helps save time on printing a card each time I need one and makes it easy to write out a price tag when I price new items.

Click here to see my Re-bottled sculptures

I make some of my sculptures from up-cycled shampoo bottles.

See how my shampoo bottle morphed into a cat.

This is a new set of biz cards that I had printed from the Vistaprint website. I tried to keep the same theme throughout my tag cards and biz cards to unify my biz identity.