making pasties in the kitchen

Because SOMETIMES sequins just aren't enough. How to upgrade your sparkle, OR, how to make rhinestone pasties. I've retrofitted a beautiful pair of gigantic snowflake-like pasties into bedazzled, rhinestoned, ultra-sparkly gigantic glimmering stars! These are necessary (and one third of the entire outfit) for our upcoming synchronized swimming act at the Tease-O-Rama Opening Night Party. 

My mother started working on these in February when she was here. She stripped off the sequins, leaving me with the beading to remove. Before I removed the beads, I traced each pastie onto the back side of some ultrasuede, which receives the carpet tape when you put the pasties on, and cut out the shapes. Yes, carpet tape. I also removed the structural mesh cones from the backs, but those will go right back on after the beading is gone.

Here you've got your bottle of Gem-Tac, a good amount of toothpicks, a white crayon, your unfortunate small amount of top tier Swarovski crystal clear rhinestones, and a whole mess of lesser rhinestones. Here comes the fun part, where I make the most out of this random collection of gems.

I had to stop here with my best rhinestones, for fear I'd run out and the pasties would end up asymmetrical. So the centers are extra, EXTRA sparkly.

You know this is a project that should've taken three, four, maybe five hours. I have two kids, one is home all day. This project has taken several weeks. During the night shift, I enjoy a glass of wine, of course, and maybe a Joy the Baker podcast while I'm gluing.

Things got really geometrical at this point. If there is a trick for avoiding this, I can only guess it. I was running really low on my B-team clear crystals at this point, even soaking the ones that I had applied poorly and taken off so that I could remove the Gem-Tac and use them again. I shaped flowy forms from the clear crystals out from the edges of the hexagons to make the design look more organic. Then came the aurora borealis rhinestones, because that's what I had left to work with, and I'll be adorning my ballet flats and fishnets in the same for the act.

In the end, here's what I ended up with. I think they are just gorgeous, and a good learning experience. Definitely will approach a little differently and methodically the next time I do this, in terms of stone pattern and design, but these will CERTAINLY do the trick. As long as they stay put! ;)