Changing your Brads...

I have a Technique post up on the Birds of a Feather blog, helping you use up some of your stash hopefully!! This thought actually came about threw the Victoria Marie no buy facebook page. There are a lot of us out there that are on a scrappy freeze right now, no buying any scrappy goodies. The main idea is to use your stash. 

So I'm here to share a little technique that might help you use up some of your stash of brads. Now I don't know about you, but I have a tone of these, in all different sizes. My problem is that there all in gold, black, white and silver. Now with some of my layouts I would like to be able to use some pretty colors that are harder to find or cost a bunch for a small pack. And I don't always want to pay for that, so here are two really easy ways for you to make the brads work for you.

So the things I gathered to do this are:

My heat gun

A pair of tweezers

Brads

Embossing Powder

Nail Polish

Ok so I'll started with the embossing powder. What you'll need to do is have the embossing powder open and set out of the way, now if your a Klutz like me this might worry you, so I sat my lid upside down on it so I had it covered but easy access. You will also need to hold the brad by the end with the tweezers and use your heat gun to heat the top of the brad.

Once the brad is nice and hot, turn off the heat gun and dip the top of the brad into the embossing powder.

If its not quite hot enough when you dip it you might have to hit it with the heat gun again to get it there all the way and if you use glitter embossing powder it will have to be hit with the heat gun again. But its a fast way to change to color.

Now with nail polish, you have soooo many options!! So what I do is grab my brads and an old nesquik container I have and poke the brads threw the lid. This way for me they have somewhere to sit while they dry.

I paint them the colors that I want. Now I have used to many kinds of nail polish, some of the 60 second dry, glitter and metallic. The 60 second nail polish I usually let thay dry for about an hour, but the rest I set aside for the night, just to make sure there all the way dry.

I love all the options and I hope this helps you use up some of your stash, or helps you match your brads to a collection your wanting to use!