Hello and welcome to Craft with Sarah and day 6 of the Halloween Craft Countdown for 2021.
Today I'm going to show you how to use one of my favorite card-making products,
and that is Nuvo Shimmer Powder from Tonic Studios.
This is my little collection of Nuvo drops and shimmer powders,
so it's the shimmer powders we'll be using today, which is these first
two rows. They come in these little bottles and they are so colorful and magical and, best of all,
they're really easy to use to make incredible effects on your handmade cards.
Nuvo shimmer powders come in these little bottles and they all have the color on the front,
so for this, as I'm doing a Halloween card, I've chosen storm cloud and then violet brocade,
Catherine wheel, and meteorite shower,
so these are all kind of dark deep colors, which will give me a really nice night-time sky feel,
and then I have a spray bottle here, which I've just filled with water from the tap.
Let's move these all over to the side, and get some paper. The best paper to use for these
is watercolor paper, because it will help with the absorption of the spray bottle water, so this is
just a watercolor pad I got on Amazon, and I've protected my work surface with some sheets of
copy paper, or you could use newspaper, or just something on there, because it does tend to spray
quite a way, so you just want to make sure you don't get a load of the paint onto your surface.
Here's my sheet of watercolor paper, and I'm going to start by just taking the shimmer powder,
get the lid off, and then turn it upside down and just tap it over the watercolor paper.
Now, when I was first given these, because I got these as a birthday gift from my husband,
I was a little bit confused, because I didn't know what they were.
I thought it was just this powder and I was not sure why I would really want that to go on a card,
because it rubbed off easily, and it was messy, and it just didn't really look that impressive.
It wasn't until I was going down the YouTube rabbit hole one day, that I saw a video on how
you actually use it, and then it completely blew my mind once I realized what it did,
so I've put my four colors on here and now this is where the magic happens, when you get the water,
so I'm going to spray this from a distance and you'll see what happens. Are you ready?
Look at that, it just transforms and each of those powders, when they go on it,
looks like it's just one color, but when you spray it, you can see each bottle is filled with a whole
rainbow of different colors, and you get this amazing effect where they all mix together.
Now, when you're happy with your design, you can just leave it to dry. I'm going to use a
heat gun to dry it because I'm impatient and I also think it does look a little bit better if
you dry it straight away. Now, you can add more powder to it when it's wet, so if I just take the
stormcloud one, I've got quite a big bit of liquid here so let's add it directly into the liquid
and then you can watch as all of the colors come out, and it starts reacting with that water.
I'm just going to grab another piece of paper and show you another way you can use it. So,
for this one, I'm going to spray the paper first. I'm just adding water to that, and this time I
will drop the shimmer powder onto the water, and you can just see it explode. It's like fireworks!
It looks so good, and what I like is that you get a different design every time,
just because of how the powder falls and the way it reacts with the water.
So, this way, it doesn't quite blend in as much if you get the water on the card first,
that you can see as this is expanding all of the different colors that are in the shimmer powder,
and then I will add one more, which is my storm cloud, my darkest color.
And these little bottles go a long way. You don't use very much of it at all
and you might find, if you're doing it with the water on first, that you kind
of want it to fill in the gaps a bit more, so there's still quite a lot of white along here,
so if you want to, you can just spray it again to help mix and direct the ink or paint.
I'm not quite sure, to fill in those gaps you can also tilt the paper to make the colors run into a
certain direction, if there's just a little place you want it to go, so that's two different methods
of using the shimmer powder, so this one was where we put the powder on first, and then sprayed it,
and you see it's much more blended and the colors have all mixed together more than this one, where
we've got the paper wet first and then your kind of colors tend to stay more in the little blocks,
unless you spray it again afterwards to mix them. So, I'm now going to dry it and I've got my little
embossing heat gun here, and this might get a little bit noisy, so apologies for that!
Hopefully, you can still hear me talking, but I'm just placing this above,
and you might not be able to tell on the video. I think my arm's in the way. Let's try this one,
but this will dry any of that water that's still on the design and keep it moving. You
don't want to burn your paper, but this is much, much, quicker than leaving it to dry naturally.
I've now dried both of these, and my papers curled a little bit at the edges where it got wet,
and then hot, so what I'd probably do when they're completely dry is press
them under some heavy books for a day or so, before I use it in my craft projects.
These shimmer powders have mica powder in them, so they have a beautiful sort of shine and shimmer,
almost like glitter, when you move them into the light and they make beautiful cards,
so here's a little look at some of that shimmer on these two.
Now, I thought what I do is show you some other backgrounds I've made with the different colors
in the range, so you can see what is available in there. Let's move these out the way,
and my protection paper, so here are some other designs that I've done.
This one uses much more of a purple and blue scheme
and then I got the orange one recently. It was the only one I didn't have,
so I was just testing that out there, so ignore that bit, but this bit looks really pretty.
Here's one where I tried mixing some colors, so for this one I sprayed it all on, and let it dry,
and then once it was dry, I put the green on again on top and sprayed it again. When
you spray it again, what's already on there will still react to that water,
but the new powder will react more, which is why it's still fairly separated on the top.
Here's one with some blue and gold, and you can get gold and silver powder and they really do
shine in the light. I'm trying to get that shimmer for you,
but the gold is really pretty and looks luxurious.
I wanted to try and make a rainbow, so for this one, I used some masking tape to go down in
straight lines, and then I did sort of one edge at time. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out,
apart from you can see a few little bits of white between the lines where I didn't quite have my
tape lined up, so this is something I'm going to be trying again, to try and perfect the technique,
and once I have that mastered, I'll do a video for you on how to make backgrounds like this.
This is one that I was doing just to test out all the different color bottles, which is why
it's all quite separate, so this just shows you a few of the extra colors that you can get
and then, again, this one was just playing something really colorful,
which would look great as the background to a greetings card.
This one is blue, and I've done it a lot smaller on the page because I think it would look nice
cut into a rectangle, so that you can see all of these edges, and this one isn't on
watercolor paper, it's some kind of a linen effect paper which didn't work as well as watercolor,
but it still worked pretty well, and then, finally, I've got this one which is all the
different kinds of green, and there's some gold, and you can see I've already used this for a card,
so I was cutting it into butterfly shapes using my Cricut machine after I'd done all the painting,
and it was dry, and this just shows you how you can use it to make really special
glitzy toppers with your Cricut to go on your handmade cards,
or if you don't have a Cricut, but you do have some punches or a sizzix machine,
or something like that, you could use it with your die cutting machine to make these lovely shapes.
There are just a couple more things left to show you, and one is a greetings card that
I have finished using this technique. Here's the card that I made, and this was cut with
the Cricut to make the butterfly effect and the wings pop out, but the background here was
made with the Nuvo shimmer powders, and it's so pretty, it works really well on a card,
so I just wanted to show you a finished card, so you could get an idea of what it does look like,
and then I've got some little dots on here. I'm not sure if you can see,
but this is also another Nuvo product called, um, glitter drops and it's kind of like a glitter
glue, but it dries 3D in these perfect little circles, and that looks really nice when it's
put on top of the shimmer powder backgrounds. Finally, I've got an experiment to show you
I thought that these shimmer powders would look good on a canvas, so here is my test canvas and
you know it's a bit of a mess, but what I did was I cut some vinyl with my Cricut machine, so, um,
removable vinyl, and stuck it onto the canvas, and then I sprayed around it with the shimmer powder,
and then when it was dry, I peeled up the vinyl and I was hoping it would be a bit more perfect
around the edges, but you can see it did bleed, so this is still a work in progress.
I've bought another couple of canvases to give it another go and see if I can work out how to stop
the bleed underneath, because once I've nailed that I think this will be a beautiful way to
make canvases. It's so shiny and shimmery, and you can add all the rainbow colors and, um, it'll be
really, really, nice once I've worked out how to stop the paint from going underneath the vinyl.
So this is something I'm working on, so you should expect another video, probably in a few months,
on how to make canvases with the Nuvo shimmer powders,
but for now I hope this video has given you a good introduction to the product, and helped you
to see how to use it, and some of the different ways that you can use it in your craft projects.
I hope that you enjoyed this video on how to use Nuvo shimmer powder on your handmade cards!
I also hope that I've given you a little bit of inspiration on the different ways that
you can use it, and if you do have these shimmer powders and you use them on your handmade cards,
I would love to see a photo, so check out the link in the description to visit my Facebook
group and share all of your wonderful crafts in there I'd really, really, like to see them.
Thank you so much for watching, and don't forget to make sure you don't miss out on
any of the Halloween craft countdown posts! Go to craftwithsarah.com/halloween2021
to sign up for free.
Thank you for watching and I'll see you again tomorrow.
Bye!