I Will Not Be Bested By Bad Glue & Glitter!

My bff Marsha had a cardiac scare recently, and fortunately is OK because they caught it in time...but she was one sick lady for a few days!  So relieved & grateful that she made it through this crisis!

I'm not religious and identify more with atheism/pagans, but Marsha has very strong faith and if anyone walks the walk, she does.  In fact, she happily and willingly dedicates her life doing for other people, so I'm not at all surprised she got this wake up call to slow down.  I was so worried about her that I burned up nervous energy by walking to town and back two days in a row, one of them being in snow.  I wanted to make Marsha something that resonated with her faith because I know how very grateful she is to be here.  I found a nice silver cross at The Whatchamacallit Shop and decided to try making a snowglobe from a baby food jar.

Last year I didn't have much luck with the snowglobe I made with a Santa figurine, because I used epoxy which stunk so bad that I couldn't even have the snowglobe in the house and it got dismantled after the holidays.  This year I reviewed a quick tutorial, which used a baby food jar.  So I bought a jar of it at the grocery store, gave the contents to Sagan and began to assemble it.  I used two tiny craft pine trees and the silver cross.  I first glued them into place on the jar lid with clear Gorilla glue.  For one thing, it holds really, really well and for another, it foams up so much when it dries that I knew it'd look like snow.  After that dried, I filled the jar with glitter, water & glycerin and glued the cap on with E6000, and waited.  

After a couple of hours, I came out to find green water and all the glitter congealed at the top.

Some of it would swirl but not much.

It looked like mercury.

Green water.  Seriously WTF.  Hardly any of the glitter sunk to the bottom like it's supposed to.

I pondered the fate of this damn project all night and into the next day.   There was nothing else I could do but try and unscrew the lid, drain out the contents and start over.  This meant carefully running a sharp knife tip between the cap and jar, scraping out the E6000, one tiny bit at a time.  I was able to unscrew the lid and clean the whole thing out.  Luckily the trees and cross were still very much glued in place.  

This time I used heavy chunks of glitter, not the fine stuff.  Fresh water and glycerin, and before I put the lid back on, I stirred the crap out of the jar contents to see if the glitter was going to float or sink to the bottom.  Finally, most of it settled on the bottom, so I used gorilla glue to reseal the lid.  And of course, I ended up with it foamed out all over the edge of the cap, and then that  required scraping it off bit by bit with an Xacto knife.  The water is a kind of pale green....not as bad as the first one at all.  And the cross is leaning a little to the left....that's how it dried.  I kind of like it that way. 

Then I headed to my ribbon stash and found a heavy, dark green and gold piece to hid the lid and bits of glue that refused to budge.  My only regret is that I didn't put a little bit more water in it.

Worked MUCH better!!!!

I made this for her too. :)