Rhinestones, with a little polish

A couple of months ago I set out to find a way to make my own enamel dots.  I tried all kinds of things and I can tell you what does NOT work:  Dropping nail polish on wax paper and waiting for it to harden (it doesn't); coating drops dried Glossy Accents (an exercise in patience that yields odd shaped bits) and a few other things that I've already forgotten.  One thing that works fairly well is painting half pearls with nail polish.  However, they are thicker than the popular enamel dots available for purchase.

Along the way I did discover these.  If you take plain rhinestones and paint them with nail polish, you get some very pretty embellishments.  The backing shines through giving them sort of a colorful glow.  They have more of a bling look than enamel dots and aren't as rounded.  Since nail polish comes in every color these days, you can do all kinds.

These were a good fit for this layout with the glitter Thickers.  The background is watercolors on watercolor paper.  I first cut a tulip design from the paper with my Cricut.  Then I painted on watercolors until I was happy with the shades.  The rest of the layout is just some simple layers of designer paper.

The rhinestones do take quite awhile to dry and I pushed it a bit and smudged a few of mine.  (I didn't learn anything from my exercise in patience mentioned above.) Hopefully that goes with the watercolor look :-)

These photos were made at Biltmore.  I made a recent trip and found the tulips at their absolute peak.


Here's the video for making enamel rhinestones:


I guess I never said why I was trying to create my own enamel dots but you can probably guess.  If you've ever used them you know that they can disappear onto a layout faster than you can fill an on-line shopping cart and they sure aren't cheap.  I did find one idea on-line but it was just more time consuming than I was willing to invest.

If you know of a good way to create your own enamel dots, please share.  In the meantime, you can dress up some rhinestones and give your nail polish a second life.

Thanks for visiting today!  Tomorrow is National Scrapbooking day!