Review of 3 glues - Cosmic Shimmer Dries Clear, Stick It! Glue pen and Anita's Tacky glue

I was very pleased to be selected to be on a review panel for CraftWorld, a thriving crafty community that I enjoy being a part of. I was sent 3 bottles of glue and asked to review them. All opinions are my own. I have not been paid for this review, but given the glues for free, for the purpose of reviewing them.

The first thing to say is that all three glues did exactly what they should - glue stuff to other stuff. I found them all to perform well and give strong adhesion on a variety of embellishments and card/paper.

I have tried various glues since I began crafting and my go to glue is Cosmic Shimmer dries clear glue, For the following reasons:

1) It dries clear, so doesn't make my projects look messy when it seeps under the die cut if I've used too much (although, as I am a bit of a perfectionist I usually remove these bits with a dedicated pokey tool)

2) I find that it has a small window of wiggle room, if I need to re-position my die cut, mat or layer, though is quite grabby and adheres quickly. This works for me because I have usually planned where I want things to go, measured my mats and layers and use tweezers to position small elements.

3) It is strong. I have had no problem with sequins or buttons falling off my projects.

I decided to test the glues in the following ways - by drawing with them, adding glitter, adhering small elements, adhering intricate die cuts onto a shiny surface and adhering different card and paper to card.

INITIAL PLAY: DRAWING LINES, SHAPES AND ADDING GLITTER

My initial play with the glue was drawing lines and simple shapes with them. Obviously I felt comfortable with the cosmic shimmer, which may be the reason the line and shapes are neater. I found the Stick It! glue pen to come out quite quickly and thickly, hence the second line for a second try, using less pressure. I was surprised with the Anita's Tacky glue at how fine and precise it came out of the nib, even though it is the largest of the bottles.

The cosmic shimmer glue requires you to cut the very tip of the sealed nib off until a hole appears. You can cut more off to get a larger hole, but I used a sharp craft knife and only took a sliver off at a time. I managed to get quite a small hole, similar in size to the Anita's nib. The Stick It! had a noticeably larger opening, which took me a while to get used to.

After drawing the lines and shapes I added some glitter and shook off immediately. It appeared to stick to all of the glues equally well.

GLUING FIDDLY DIE CUTS

I had an intricate border die close at hand, so decided to cut it up and try sticking a piece of each using each of the glues. This is typical of how I would adhere a fiddly die cut - by using tweezers and dotting the glue onto the back. I found the Cosmic Shimmer and Anita's to perform similarly but wasn't able to be as precise with the Stick It! pen, so got some slightly bigger blobs, thus some seepage, which I tidied with my pokey tool. This wasn't a big deal and could in part be due to me not being used to using a glue pen and needing to find the best pressure to use.

I took a photo of the nibs to show the difference in nib size and you can just about see that the Stick It! is larger.

GLUING DIFFERENT THINGS ONTO CARD

Next I decided to test the glues out using them on a sequin, a button and a leftover piece of mirror card die cut. This was taken straight after I had stuck them on. I only put a tiny drop of Anita's on the sequin and at first I thought it wasn't going to stick properly, but it did. You may notice a that there is seepage on the purple die cuts on the cosmic shimmer and the Stick It! tests, but not on the Anita's. At this point I'm really starting to like the Anita's and how precise the nib is, meaning I can get such tiny dots. Things like this are important to me, as I do do intricate die cutting for projects and use the above method. I know there are other methods though, such as using a small sponge to apply glue, or putting some glue on the back of your hand and dabbing the die cut in, but this is the method I have found works well for me.

GLUING 1 INCH SQUARES OF CARD, TEXTURED PAPER AND PEARLISED PAPER

I did this as I wanted to see whether the glue left any bumpy lines or anything, or behaved differently with the different types of card/paper. This is the photo from the next day and I can't see any differences. I only put a thin line around each square before sticking down using tweezers. Here I also performed a "wiggle test" and noticed that there was more "wiggle time" with the Stick It! and Anita's than the cosmic shimmer, which as I said previously, I find grabs onto the surface quite quickly - hence the gold square of card on the Stick It! row, which I accidentally stuck down with cosmic shimmer, realised straight away, but could not get off. I cut it away and added another piece of white card to use the correct glue. I think this may be an example of where it would be good to have a few different types of glue in my stash, with different properties. If I need something that will adhere quickly I would use cosmic shimmer, if I though I might need to move the die cut around a bit more I might use one of the other two glues.

THE DAY AFTER

IN CONCLUSION

In conclusion, all of the glues that I tried performed well under a variety of conditions. They all formed a strong bond and I was able to get precise results with all of them.

I tried to gently pull the sequins and buttons away from the card this morning and they were all firmly adhered.

I found the Cosmic Shimmer to have the least amount of wiggle time and the other two to be very similar.

If using the Stick It!, I would be careful not to put it too close to the edges of what I want to adhere, to prevent seepage. But that's just me, it might not bother someone else and all 3 glues dry clear anyway. My perfectionist self will probably carry on using my dedicated glue scraping pokey tool!

I would be (and am) happy to have any of these glues in my stash. They all do what they say they will do and are all very reasonably priced on CraftStash. I was surprised that the huge bottle of Anita's is only £3.99 at the time of writing (01/10/2020), with the Stick It! being the cheapest at £1.49 and the Cosmic Shimmer being £2.79. I'm still undecided as to whether I will decant some of the Anita's Tacky into smaller bottles. I'll need to see if I can get used to holding such a big bottle.

Thank you to CraftWorld for selecting me to be on the review panel, I really enjoyed testing the products and creating the review.

If you've made it to the end of this review then well done and I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and/or useful.

Best Wishes everyone, Terri/veegstez - pronounced VeegsTez