Playing with Tim

Last month I travelled with Angela to Boston to attend a trade show designed for store owners and employees. While there, I took three classes with Tim Holtz. I was really excited about the classes because even though my style of stamping differs a lot from Tim's, I heard he is a wonderful instructor. Well, the rumors are true. He rocks as an instructor. I was very impressed with his slide shows and his ability to keep everyone on track and focused. Plus, it doesn't hurt that the man really, really knows his stuff!

As for the classes, my head was filled with ideas from all of them even though I don't know that I will make the specific projects again. In my Distress Ink class, I was able to play with all the new colors of Distress Ink and fell in love with each and every one of them. Just how many colors do I need?! Instead of making cards, we used the inks to color the grungeboard roses we made. I have to say, I am not sure that I am a "build your own flower" kind of gal. It sure is a lot of steps!

In the second class, I got a chance to make some jewelry with Tim's new Ideology elements. The jewelry pieces are cool, but not necessarily my style to wear. We made a metal rose from scratch (see my feelings on that above) which turned out pretty dang awesome. What I liked best about this class was Tim's thoughts on coloring metals. We did a faux patina on metal using some Adirondack paint daubers as well as colored metals with a mix of alcohol inks and metal mixatives. I can't wait to play around with these techniques more!

The picture above is from my third class. We made a house tryptich out of canvases using Claudine Helmuth's product line (Tim and Claudine both work with Ranger). It was interesting to see Tim's take on the products since he and Claudine are so different from each other. For the first house with the numbers, Tim showed us a transfer technique he learned from Claudine that allowed us to transfer his numbered paper onto sticky back canvas. I can't tell you enough how much I loved this. Attention friends and family, you might be getting paper transfer canvases for Christmas. :)