Having Fun With "Perfect Pearls"

This is another card I made for last week's CASE challenge at Mothers and Daughters Creations. (See the post just before this one for more information about CASEing cards.)

I “CASED” this card from this card by Lynda Benden in the MDC design gallery. As Lynda did, I used an Outlines image, although instead of the butterfly, I chose one of my favorites, the Sparkle Flower Frame. I kept her basic sketch, modified slightly for a rectangular card. I replaced her short ribbon tail with a satin bow and her round sentiment with a Prisma flower. I used a different lace edge punch to border my central panel, but used a similar polka dotted paper from the Bo Bunny line.

For my card base, used plain ivory card stock and then built my card on a panel of Kosomi card stock from Hanko. I chose this paper because the delicate small floral design compliments the polka dots in the darker panel and the two colors worked well together. Although it may be hard to see in this picture, Kosomi paper is embossed with a tiny pale star shaped flower design arranged geometrically like the polka dots.

I used Ranger’s "Perfect Pearls" to color the images. I love the soft, shimmery effect of the Perfect Pearls. The colors are subtle, perfect for the color shades of the paper I’d chosen. Lynda had embellished her lace border; I chose to embellish the flower frame image instead, and added blue and clear rhinestones.

How to color with Perfect Pearls:

Ranger’s Perfect Pearls has become my new favorite way to color when I want to add shimmery elegance. The colors are subtle, but show up brighter than they did on this card if you use a coated paper like textured or glossy card stock. Applying Perfect Pearls is easy. You can stamp an image using the Perfect Medium in place of ink and then dust the image with the color, or you can color in an image as I did here with a Perfect Medium Pen.

For this paper, I didn’t plan ahead and stamped my image on regular card stock, which has a lot of “tooth” and grabs and holds the powder. I had stamped and embossed my image using Detail Gold embossing powder before I decided to use the Perfect Pearls. Thus, I had to work a little harder than usual to remove the excess pearl powder.

First, color in the design with the colorless Perfect Medium pen. Color only the areas that will be finished in the same color.







Next, using the smaller of the two brushes that comes with the Perfect Pearls kit, lift out a small amount of powder and brush it over the area you’ve covered with the Perfect Medium.




Brush off the excess (if there is a lot, you can brush it onto a piece of paper and tap it back into the canister) with the large brush. In this case, because the paper I used was holding the powder, I had to buff off the extra powder, but the Perfect Medium bonds the Perfect Pearls, so you can actually buff it with a piece of microfiber fabric and the color will remain where you put the Perfect Medium.

Continue to add color, one color at a time, until the entire image is colored. Here it is before I added the rhinestones.

Adding the rhinestones added glitz to glam. I did find, however, that self-adhesive rhinestones don't stick well to the Perfect Pearls. I used a little drop of dimensional adhesive even with self-stick rhinies and that worked like a charm.