Fairies in a Jar

What is diamond glitter, anyway?

How To Make Fairies In A Jar This is something everyone will love you can just imagine the look on your childs face when they see this and its something they will never forget so its worth a little work on this one. FAIRIES IN A JAR DIRECTIONS: 1. Cut a glow stick and shake the contents into a jar. Add diamond glitter 2. Seal the top diy

I love so many things about this one.  The misspellings on the picture, the poor punctuation in the description, the instructions to shake hard. . .It's all comedy gold.

It's kind of strange how this very specific description shows up all over the web.  Try it; Google "something they will never forget so its worth a little work on this one."  It comes up in all sorts of places.

The earliest mention I could find was from May 2012 on KWNR.  Who knows where it came from before that.

Something worth mentioning: Diamond glitter is a specific type of glitter.  Most of the people who have tried to recreate this pin have been using regular glitter.  Diamond glitter is ground glass rather than normal glitter.  Theoretically, ground up pieces of glass would give you more of a sparkly prismatic effect, where the people using regular glitter have wound up with dark spots where their glitter blocks the glowing light.

This may be why the instructions say to "seal" the top of the jar, rather than just "put the lid on."  Yes, glitter is the herpes of the craft world and you don't want it getting out, but if you're doing this with children, probably the last thing you want is a bunch of teeny glass shards and probably-toxic glow stick fluid getting loose on your kids.

Back to the pin.  No matter what kind of glitter you use, you're not getting the result in that picture.  It's a beautiful piece of work, but it's not something you can replicate in real life with a glow stick and some glass dust.

The good news is, there IS a way to make a jar that has little glowing spots in it.  To do it, you need to use glow in the dark paint (and no, not the kind you make by using the liquid from a highlighter - that is not "glow in the dark," that is "fluorescent").  

Check out this tutorial by Panka for a very nice illustration of how this can work.