Review of JudiKins Diamond Glaze Water-based Dimensional Adhesive

After putting glitter on one of my scrapbook pages, I started to worry it would fall right off the second I put the page in my scrapbook. My expert friends on Scrapbook.com recommended various things including JudiKins Diamond Glaze Water-based Dimensional Adhesive. Since all of the suggestions sounded good, I decided to purchase JudiKins Diamond Glaze since it was one of the cheapest suggestions. found it on Amazon so I could use a gift card.

What is it?

JudiKins Diamond Glaze is called an adhesive but it really seems to be better for putting on top of projects. From the bottle "Use directly over artwork for a raised glass-like finish. Thin with water for a lacquer like finish. Create your own colors by adding a small amount of dye ink. Absolutely the best adhesive for gluing glitter, beads, glass, plastic and vellum to paper." If you don't want to thin it, you can use it right out of the bottle. It has a small tip on the top that can be cut if you want more to come out at a time. I ended up cutting it down a few times because I couldn't seem to get any out otherwise. The product comes out as a liquidy gel and goes on white, which looks really bad at first. However the glaze dries clear so that it is see-through.

What's good about it?

Once I got it coming out, JudiKins Diamond Glaze could generally be applied like a pen and go right along with artwork. So when trying to write over my glitter lines, it worked pretty well at first. It came out smooth, most of the time. It looks like it's thick when it first goes on, but as it dries it looks much flatter and thinner. Overall, the final appearance was nice in the instances where it went on just the way I wanted it.

What's bad about it?

JudiKins Diamond Glaze does have some issues. The first and most noticable were the air bubbles. The product website warns about air bubbles and even the bottle says "Do Not Shake". This is so that you do not create air bubbles. The trouble with air bubbles is that they came out while I was applying the product, and I was forced to pop the bubbles which left a splat of the product in certain areas. I followed all the advice about air bubbles but they seemed to keep coming at various spots.

My second problem came when the product stopped coming out smoothly. I was applying equal pressure and was able to write all my letters at once, then I moved on to a long swirly line and the product kept skipping to the point that I had gaps all throughout my swirly line. It wasn't too tough to fill these back in, but it was definitely annoying.

To prevent the skipping, I started to squeeze the bottle harder to make it come out more smoothly. However, as I squeezed harder to get the product to come out, it started coming out the sides of the lid. This caused some to drip on my page in a place that was hard to clean off. It also dripped some on my tv tray, luckily I wasn't doing this over my dining room table because this stuff is nearly impossible to clean off if you don't get it right away.

It takes a very long time to dry, so I couldn't touch my page and I shouldn't even MOVE it because the glaze easily seems to slide around if I even pick up the page. The best bet is to let it dry overnight in a safe place just to be sure.

Finally, and this is kind of a big deal, it warped my paper! Any scrapbooker knows that this is not good. Warped paper is not completely flat and only usually happens if you use cheap glues. It didn't warp my entire page, but it definitely caused it to warp in 2-3 spots that used to be flat :( It is not horrible, but it's definitely something scrapbookers will notice. Luckily I don't think anyone viewing my scrapbook would notice.

Overall

While JudiKins Diamond Glaze did give a nice finishing effect, I found it had a lot of issues that make me leary of using it in the future. JudiKins cost me 11$ when I added in shipping. Luckily I had gift cards to use because otherwise I would think this was a rip off. I will use it, just to use it up, but probably just for embellishments or special effects. Next time I have a glitter problem, I will try one of the many other suggestions Scrapbook users have given me. Use at your own risk!