Frugal Friday...Dew Drops

Okay…so I had never heard of Dew Drops before…but I came across a video on how to make your own…and being of an inquiring mind, I checked it out.

Apparently Dew Drops (also called skittles) are tiny acrylic blobs (and you know how I love blobs) that you use as decoration on your layouts. Okay…I’ll bite…how do you make them?

It’s pretty simple, all you need is a hot glue gun, glue sticks, release paper (love this stuff!), and some alcohol inks. (I also found instructions using Diamond Glaze or Glossy Accents…more about that below)

First, place your release paper down and get your glue gun heated up. Make sure the glue gun is nice and hot, this works much better when it is HOT!

Place small blobs (there is that word again) of glue on your release paper and let them cool.

There is a bit of finesse that is needed for this, and after a bit of practice, here is my hint:

squeeze the gun trigger, letting the glue out into the blob; release the trigger BEFORE you pull the gun away from the blob.

With the trigger released, kinda swirl the nozzle a bit…the resulting peak of glue will fall into the blob and level itself out.

There are the inevitable glue gun threads,

but after the glue has cooled, these are easily removed.

As you can see, the in the top row…the glue gun wasn’t hot enough and I had trouble getting the blobs to form circles…

I tried, as one video suggested, using Glossy Accents for this as well. The blob placement was easier than with the glue gun, but the resulting drops were far flatter and quite a bit tackier (as in sticky…not ugly…although in all honestly I did think they were uglier than the glue gun drops…)

To color the drops, I placed a small amount of them in a plastic baggie

along with several (10-12) drops of alcohol ink. I used Ranger Arts inks.

Smoosh the baggie around to get the ink on all the drops…

And dump them out on a piece of scratch paper to dry…I separated the drops for the drying, it was a bit messy and now I really need a manicure! Aw, such is the life of a messy scrapper!

The drying only took about 15-20 minutes, but to be good and sure, I left them out overnight to dry and placed them in a baggie for storage.

Overall the coloring on most of the drops was a bit mottled, sorta tie-dyeish, but I liked it. There are tiny air bubbles in the drops, which I’m sure aren’t in the real thing, but again I kinda like that too.

Here is a close-up comparison of the hot glue drops and the Glossy Accents drops…both colored Wild Plum…I like the thickness of the hot glue much better.

Here is a layout I made using my new colored dew drops…

I used sticky spots to adhere the drops to the page.

So was the experiment worth it? Here is the tally:

Cost: I had everything on hand…but a package of 50 hot glue sticks runs about $6…and that would make a lot of dew drops!

Cats Annoyed: 0 cats…1 human! (my fingernails are varying shades of the rainbow at the moment, and I have a wedding to go to this weekend!)

Time: The glossy accents took a few hours to dry, while the hot glue was set pretty quickly. The coloring of the drops was pretty quick.

Skill Level: intermediate, a little flair with the hot glue gun is definitely need, there is a learning curve.

So there it is, homemade dew drops! Easy Peasy…and Cheap! Cheap!