How To Make Googly Eyes Stick

Is your googly eye not cooperating with your craft project? If you love using googly eyes for crafts then you may have often wondering how to make googly eyes stick? It can be a battle to make googly eyes stick, but it does not have to be a battle! If you are fighting with the googly eye then I have a few tips and tricks to make those cute little googly eyes stick.

In a perfect craft world googly eye crafts should be easy, right? Easy as in the googly eyes are self adhesive so of course they should stick. But they do not! Not to mention trying to peel the paper off a googly eye is an exercise of patience and exhaustion when using many googly eyes in a craft.

The Top Four Ways To Make Googly Eyes Stick

1. Use clear drying tacky craft glue. Forget the self adhesive backing of the googly eyes. Save yourself time and effort by ignoring it. Invest in a strong and clear drying craft glue. Your googly eye craft will thank you. I love Weldbond glue for all crafts, this is a glue that dries clear and is supremely strong. It can be used not only for crafting, but all household projects. Who doesn’t love a glue that can be used in crafts and fix broken wood, china and even fix broken wood all in one bottle.
2. Glue Stick. A glue stick can work with the caveat the glue needs to be heavily applied. Glue sticks will adhere the googly eyes to paper googly eye crafts. The glue stick will not work on fabric or a hard surface such as glass. In the below Googly Eye Bat I used both the glue stick and tacky glue and as the glue has not dried the glue is visible. No worries both glues will disappear when dried.
3. Glue Gun. I have had success with the glue gun in making googly eyes stick. This is especially true on making googly eyes stick to felt or fabric. But you must act fast and press the googly eye into a dab of hot glue immediately after applying the glue. I have also found that in this case peeling the self adhesive backing off the googly eye first does make the hot glue and googly eye bond quicker and stronger. But let’s not talk about the patience needed to deal with the glue strands which must be tamed.
4. Glue Dots. Using glue dots depends upon the patience and time factor. A good quality glue dot can work (I tried a discount glue dot with limited success)

The Tool Every Googly Eye Crafter Needs

Googly eyes are slippery little devils! The best investment when working with googly eyes is a set of crafting tweezers. This allows the googly eye to be grabbed and easily placed in the desired location. 

Need Googly Eye Craft Ideas?

Halloween is the perfect holiday for Halloween googly eye crafts. 

I recycled a mason jar to turn the jar into a Halloween Mason Jar vase to fill with fresh flowers or Halloween treats for the season.

I also had an explosion of googly eyes in the craft closet and upcycled Amazon boxes (such sturdy boxes!) into Halloween Googly Eye Bats. These bats can be made to fly with invisible string or make cute Halloween kitchen magnets.

And what is Christmas without adding googly eyes to the homemade Christmas ornaments and decorations!