REVIEW: Crystals & Gems self adhesive gems

The exciting package I received!

I featured the Crystals and Gems studding equipment in a post a few weeks ago – big congratulations to Amanda for winning the competition! Now they have sent me a lovely set of self adhesive gems – a special Christmas set, which I was massively excited to receive!

Crystals and Gems are a lovely little company, the embellishment  part of Bijoux by Me, a jewellery making company who, amongst other things can help teach you to make your own Shamballa bracelets – all the rage right now!

I received a Christmas Royal pack of gems, a set of self adhesive stars and a pack of 6 silver floral designs. The Christmas pack is really cute, containing prancing reindeers, Christmas trees, snowflakes, holly, Christmas wreaths, “Merry Christmas” slogans and green and red gem strips. I was quite surprised that all of the gems in a design are all stuck together – I was quite looking forward to the challenge of recreating the design, but luckily Crystals and Gems are more progressively minded than me and have realised that I’d probably mess it up and take FOREVER if they didn’t have the design ready for me to pick up in one easy step!

So, armed with my lovely gem tool with its attractive blue glittery handle, and feeling a little bit like an extra out of Thelma’s Gypsy Girls, I got to glamming up my first project.* This was a little tutu that I had bought for a friend’s little girl for Christmas. I knew I wanted to perk the plain black tutu up a bit to make it a better fancydress outfit, but I hadn’t decided what to do with it. I added self adhesive stars and actually cut up the red and green strip into individual gems to give the tutu more coverage. The picture doesn’t really do it justice, but the skirt has about 30 stars on, interspersed with green and red gems including one on ever single tassle along the bottom. It’s really eye catching now and I hope the girl in question will love getting this as part of her Christmas box from us! I definitely enjoyed working on it too!

The process is really easy, just use the tool to lift the gem and its adhesive off the backing layer and add it to the required surface. You can add it to fabric, metal, paper, card, even skin! You know I am putting “Merry Christmas” somewhere inappropriate on myself this party season. No really, I really am.

In the spirit of the season, I pimped some other items so that you can get some ideas of the flexibility of these gems. Here’s my prancing reindeer candle, great for the Christmas table:

Or making your Christmas cards that little bit more special this year:

I really think these are lovely. They’re really easy to apply and the adhesive is very strong, so I really wouldn’t hesitate to try these on any material. I give them an easy 9 out of 10 Extreme Points because they do everything I want, I would just also like to be able to get hold of a set of the small gems individually so that I could use them to make up my own designs. These are available in silver or multi colours so I think I will be investing soon. It’s worth noting that of course, they have a much wider range beyond the Christmas stuff. 

What would you add a little sparkle to?

* As an aside I’d really like to point out that I absolutely love that the tool for easy application of the gems is called a ‘pokey tool’ on the Crystals and Gems website. That’s what it does and therefore that’s what it is. Makes me happy.