Can You Tell the Difference?

I was making some clear ornaments the day before and I was using my polar white Flower Soft inside to make it look like there was snow inside the balls.  All I had on hand was the one little container and I ran out of Flower Soft.  Luckily I had bought a package of the white foam balls to test out making my own Flower Soft.  If you haven't heard of this before, you take the foam balls and rub them together to grate them, and it looks and feels just like Flower Soft.  You need to use the foam that's hard and looks sparkly - not the styrofoam one like the stuff styrofoam cups are made out of.  Here's a picture of the foam balls I used:

Here's a picture of one of the ornaments with the Flower Soft inside.  I put the container from the Flower soft beside it in case you haven't seen this product yet.  Its actually filled with the grated foam and not Flower Soft.

For the ornaments, you cut a circle of acetate just slightly smaller than the diameter of your ornament (just a hair smaller). Stamp your image with Stazon ink, and then colour on the reverse side with Sharpies, Bics, or Copics.  If you colour on the same side as you stamp with the Stazon ink, your maker inks will wipe away the Stazon.  Once the inks have dried, you roll your acetate into a tube small enough to fit through the opening at the top of the ornament.  Push the acetate through and it will unroll, going across the inside of the ornament. You can put your Flower Soft, or glitter, or confetti in before or after you put your acetate in there, either way works.  I used long nose tweezers to position the image inside.

Now here's a picture of some Flower Soft and foam gratings side by side (click on the picture to open it up full size to get a good look at it).  Can you tell which one is which?  If I didn't know, I don't think I would be able to tell the difference...

Since both look pretty much exactly a like, I think I'll be using the foam balls from now on.  You can also use re-inker to custom dye the foam.  I do have one other pot of Flower Soft - Sweet Pea - which is multi-coloured, but I think you could also just make your own custom colour mixes as well.  The little pot of Polar White Flower Soft cost me $9.99 ($10.49 with tax).  My little pot of the Sweet Pea was $8.99 ($9.44 with tax).  I was able to get 6 foam balls for $4.99 ($5.24 with tax) at Walmart.  Out of 3 - 2.5" balls I got enough "Flower Soft" to fill 3 Flower Soft containers - so basically one container for every 2.5" foam ball.  That works out to about 87cents in total for a container.  Sure a lot cheaper than $10 a container...  Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't support the craft companies and buy their products.  But, this is a much more economical way to achieve the same results as Flower Soft and is great for the people with very limited budgets.

So, do you want to know which one is which?  The one on the right is the Flower Soft.  If I didn't tell you, I don't think you would be able to tell the difference.  Am I right?

That's it for today.

Talk to you later...

Cat