This is my silliest project to date. No question.
I admitted earlier this week that I am intimidated by bling. I am never really sure how to use it without it looking cheap or gaudy or ridiculous. I finally decided that the best way to get over that hang-up was to purposefully make something cheap, gaudy, and ridiculous. And, guess what? It’s also kind of fabulous.
These jewel-encrusted animals are so over the top that it’s really hard not to like them. And the bonus is that they were really easy to make thank to the Gemz from Darice.
from Darice. 
To make Bejeweled Beasts, you will need:
plastic animal toys
gold spray paint
gold Gemz
scissors
For this project I used the same kind of plastic animals from Dollar Tree that I used to make my Faux Bronze Animal Head Bookends. DT doesn’t always have them in stock, but they usually have plastics dinosaurs around. And who wouldn’t LOVE a sparkly triceratops?
Begin by giving your plastic animals a coat of gold paint. I used Martha Stewart liquid gilding because it still isn’t spray paint weather here, but spray paint would be much easier.
The cool thing about Gemz, as opposed to other adhesive gems, is that the gems are on one long adhesive strip. You don’t have to take each individual gem off the strip and then adhere it to the project, painstakingly and tediously. You can just cut off what you need, peel off the backing, and stick it on. As much or as little as you need! AND, the gems are not hard plastic like rhinestones. They have a consistency of a sort of gummy rubber, so you can cut right through them too!
I gave my gorgeous giraffe some Gemz spots by cutting small pieces off of the strip and sticking them to the giraffe’s body. You can see that I cut right through some of the Gemz, so that the spots didn’t have to all be squares and rectangles.
The hippo got the full on bling treatment. I cut strips that were one or two Gemz wide and stuck them down on the toy. The Gemz molded to all the curves of hippo without having to put each one on individually (which I would never have actually done because I would have lost what’s left of my mind).
Just look how smug the giraffe is. She knows she looks fabulous.
This is obviously an impractical and frivolous project, but that’s part of why I love it. Sometimes creating should just be fun. Not practical, not functional. Just fun. And these critters are nothing if not fun.
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Thanks, Jessica
