I got several nice books on decorating for Christmas at the post-Christmas sale at Border’s this year. They’re full of ideas for ornaments, one of which was to apply gold leafing (which comes in both real and fake varieties – this is the fake) to clear plastic balls in various designs. Two things about this:

1. Gold leafing is kind of hard to do on a ball. It might be better to learn the technique on something flatter and easier to handle.

2. Glass was wrong – plastic was right. The way that gold leafing goes on is you apply a glue first, wait for it to almost dry, then rub the gold leafing on to it. In order to get a good transfer you need to rub pretty hard. Well, luckily they must coat the insides of those glass balls with something to keep them from shattering so I didn’t actually sever my thumb, but I certainly did destroy the ball.

This pattern of random dots was my third and last attempt at applying gold leafing to glass balls. It was the only one I kept. One ball got broken just trying to remove it from the plastic tray it came in. So out of a box of 4 balls, luckily acquired very cheaply in another post-Christmas sale this time from Michael’s, I got one ornament. I do have plenty of gold leafing left though and perhaps I’ll give it another try some day on a surface either flatter or less fragile.