Frugal Friday...and Other Shimmery Ideas

Shimmery is definitely in these days, but as with all scrapping supplies, stocking up on all the colors of shimmery mists can prove to be very expensive. So I set out this week to see what recipes there were out there for homemade shimmer mists…and YouTube proved to be very fertile ground for videos. After weeding through tons of videos I tried it out and here is what I found.

The recipe is pretty basic, shimmer mist is just VERY watered down acrylic paints (definitely use the cheap stuff; don’t waste your artist’s acrylics on this project). There are two ways you can add the shimmer to the mist; by using a metallic paint or by adding Perfect Pearls (by Ranger) or Pearlex Mica Powder (by Jacquard)…I even saw a suggestion on using eye shadow! If you use Pearlex or eye shadow for the shimmer, you also need to add a fixative to the mist…here we go:

Supplies:

Small spray bottle (1-2oz.)

Warm Water

Acrylic Paint

Perfect Pearls – optional

or

Pearlex or eye shadow and white glue (such as Aileen’s Tacky Glue) – optional

Directions:

Fill the spray bottle about ¾ full with warm water


Add a generous glop of acrylic paint (about 3-4 tablespoons)


If you are not using metallic paint, add about ½ teaspoon of Perfect Pearls


Shake and spray…simple!


In this sample, the pink, blue, yellow and green shimmer mist all use Perfect Pearls, the purple shimmer mist used purple paint and metallic gold paint.


The green shimmer mist is a combination of yellow and blue paints…so the possibility of colors is almost endless!

If you use Pearlex or eye shadow in place of the Perfect Pearls also add about ½ teaspoon of white glue to insure that the shimmer of the Pearlex or eye shadow does not rub off the final project. (I did not try this recipe out because I didn’t have any spare eye shadow…but I want to, to see if it works).

I also tried using ink instead of acrylic paint…it worked, but the resulting spray is far more translucent than the shimmer mist using the paint…not sure if I would waste my re-inkers on this, since they are so much more expensive than paint.

You can see how much more translucent the ink spray is versus the yellow paint spray…

And finally, here is a quick page I threw together using my sample paper…

And the tally is:

Cost: Varies…I had Perfect Pearls in my stash, but if you buy them they are about $3 for one pot, or $15 for a set of 4. I spent $1.39 on the spray bottles (from Sally’s Beauty Supply), and $0.97 on the paint from Wal-Mart. A bottle of metallic paint was $1.29.

Cats Annoyed: Not a single one! Can you believe it?!?!

Time: Less than 5 minutes to get everything put together.

Skill Level: basic

So there it is homemade shimmer mist! Easy Peasy…and Cheap! Cheap!