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Who would have thought that floor polish could bring a bit of sparkle to your life!!!  But it certainly does with the Caught in Crystal technique.


When I first heard of Caught in Crystal I assumed the floor polish crystallised when it hardened.  This isn’t the case, it acts more as an adhesive that dries clear and can be sloshed around to soak up the tissue.  The sparkle you add yourself.  This can be ultra-fine glitter, pearlex, or anything that sparkles!

I use an old Craft Creations catalogue for all my messy stuff – sometimes I see things I missed before as I splatter the pages!


Take your acetate, and attach it to your catalogue with masking tape.  This is to prevent the polish seeping underneath the acetate, so make sure you cover each edge to create that seal.

Now pour some floor polish on the acetate and spread it around with a brush.


Take your ultrafine glitter or alternative sparkle, and  sprinkle it onto the polish – I find doing this from high up scatters the glitter more evenly. you can put some pearlex on a brush, and just tap the brush gently, or blow it onto the polish too.



Take a piece of tissue paper and screw it up in a ball.  Open it up again and place it on your acetate.  Tap it gently in the middle, and gradually press down all over to soak in the polish.  Working from the middle out helps get rid of air bubbles.  It is better to tap than to smooth as smoothing pushes the glitter to the edge.  

Now you can add some colour to your tissue.  Here I have put a spot of alcohol ink on my brush, and gently dabbed it onto the tissue as I didn’t want the colours to be too dark.  The Wild Plum colour reacts with the polish to make a beautiful cerise pink.

I like to build up several layers of tissue, splodging floor polish in between each layer, but you can do what you like – the less layers you do, the more opaque your finished piece will be.  Lots of layers can give you a mulberry paper look on the reverse, which is as nice to use as the sparkly front!


I tend to leave my pieces overnight to dry naturally, you can however heat them gently with your heat gun if you are sure your acetate can take it!  Once dry you can cut it away from your catalogue sheet, and stamp images on the shiny surface.

Caught in Crystal

The floor polish you need for this technique is Johnson’s Klear polish. I have heard that this has been discontinued, but can still be found in pound shops.

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