Oozing Goo - The Lava Lamp Syndicate

A Glitter Odyssey: Pt. V, The Home Stretch

Whew! this post has been a loooooooooooong time coming.

Well, as many of you know, I've been working on making custom punched glitter, ever since I first saw that WaMu lamp and bought it on ebay...the one with the house-shaped glitter flakes. That lamp infected me with an idea!

It's taken me a lot of time, effort, and money, but I'm finally close to being able to take custom cut glitter orders...but with a disclaimer.

So ok, first things first...

After trying all kinds of mylar for substitute glitter, in all kinds of thicknesses with no luck, I was about to give up. However, the unusual shape of the default glitter in these lamps clued me into something...

I did a lot of searching, THEN I found out what the glitter is made out of. Then I found a place to try out that material from, and got them to send me a sample.

That sample pack finally arrived... And...

I was disappointed. :(

First off, they were supposed to send me red, green, blue, and gold films. They sent pink, mint green matte, silver matte, and white iridescent. :-/ When I asked for metalized film, I didn't realize that there was a matte version of that. Sigh...

Not only that, but the material totally pulls and stretches in the punch, rather than cutting cleanly like I had hoped it would. I had had similar experiences with mylar, so I resorted to some of my old tricks...wrapping the film in paper on both sides before punching. That worked with some patterns, but not others.

So I tried using post-it notes, which have adhesive, but nothing too strong. That was a success...mostly! There still were some patterns that did not want to punch without tearing, pulling, and jamming up the punches. :( Not only that, but even when it DID work, I suddenly had glitter that had paper stuck to both sides of it. It is VERY hard to get that paper off of every piece of glitter, but it's possible if you're patient.

THEN, in order to get the glitter to flow, you have to hand wash each and every individual piece of glitter to get the leftover adhesive off, then wash in a bottle of warm soapy water and rinse. Once the glitter comes out of that soapy solution, YOU CANNOT TOUCH THE GLITTER with your hands...at all. If you do, it won't flow. It'll just float on the surface. You have to wear rubber gloves, or use tweezers to move the glitter around piece by piece.

If I start doing these custom glitters, there are some things that I would like to announce...

1) These lamps will likely be over the $50 price I originally quoted...how much over, I haven't determined yet, but that lamp took me many, many hours of toil, and the film is not as cheap as it should be.

2) People will have to allow me ample time to make these lamps for them. I will go as fast as I can, but this process is slow and laborious, to say the least.

3) I cannot guarantee that I can produce all of the punch shapes that you want, and I don't have to time or material to test out all 200+ punch patterns that I currently have. I will have to test them as people require them, and let them know how that goes. I am so sorry for this inconvenience... :(

4) I STILL don't have the colors I need, and some of the ones I was sent were not colorfast, like the pink. After one day in the glitter solution, the pink film went totally silver. This will not do!

So in other words...I guess I'm not really ready to take custom glitter orders yet. :(

But how do people feel about those limitations? Is $60-$75 just WAY too much to have to pay? I'm currently trying desperately to refine the process to make it quicker, cheaper, and easier...but it's very hard.

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Comment by Keith on June 4, 2013 at 3:15pm

Although I'm not in the market for glitter lamps I think that price range is reasonable for one-off custom lamps.  I think most people on here also understand the limitations of an individual doing custom lamps while also working a day job and would be willing to wait for it to be finished properly.  I wish you success and I thank you for making this community that much more special.

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