Me and Tim Holtz!

Hi everyone! Well, yesterday was an exciting day for many girls in Buffalo...we got to take a class from none other than Tim Holtz! The owner of our LSS, Sharon from Buffalo Stamps & Stuff, managed to get him to do 4 classes over this weekend. I must say that Sharon is a lovely lady and has the most FABULOUS store! It's like "Cheers" where everybody knows your name! You walk in and get an immediate greeting of "Hi Lisa!" Love that! She has taken many of Tim's classes and has met him many times. It's no wonder that he wanted to come do these classes for her! You can read what Tim had to say about it here and here on his blog!

I have lots of pictures to share, first up being me and Tim, of course!

OK, a little blurry, but it's really me and Tim! (We had to wear name tags, so that's the white thing on my black shirt...oye!) He's cute, isn't he?

My friends, Cheryl Rowley and Tracy Harp, took the class with me as well. It was called Generation Grunge, where Tim (we're on a first-name basis now ;-)!) showed us all his grunge material and how to work with it. And work with it we did! This is the final project I created.

I have to tell you all the steps that went into this amazing project. First, we had to cover the grunge board pages and cover pages with his paper. We used a multi-medium matte glue from Claudine Hellmuth Studio. Great stuff! We sponged it on the grunge board, put the paper on top, then SAT ON IT to help it adhere while we did another page! This was hilarious watching everyone stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down....! He must have been laughing at us in his head! Then we had to cut the square paper to match the flourished edge. After we did this on one side, we had to repeat it on the OTHER side! This took about an hour, no lie! After that step, we used his sanding block to sand all the edges to a white color. My arm was KILLING me after that process! (Mental note: lift more weights to strengthen the arms!) My black shirt was also covered in dust! Then we had to ink up and distress the edges with his Distress inks. Here's a picture of the pages.

I think I would have done a little better at the sanding if I had lifted more weights before the class!

We also stamped and distressed bags that had a little sheen to them.

Isn't that flourish fabulous? And look at that paper...I'm in love with that floral design!

Then we put the flower together and added the embellishments. The flower was cut with his die beforehand and we "distressed" it with his cool Craft Scratcher tool. It has little metal "fingers" that pull the strands from the material and makes it lookes more distressed. We added some tulle and a pretty button. The knob was so cool...it had a screw attachement.

The birdcage was also cut with his die cut beforehand, and we painted it with his paint daubers, scratched it up with his sanding block, then distressed it with distressed ink. The bird was all ready for us to add some ink to it and some distress stickles. We also added the crystals to the cage with jump rings. So pretty!
Next up was adding the "hinges" and hardware. We added our inital for the one piece.
I purchased his book, A Compendium of Curiosities to read more about his work.....
...as well as get his autograph! ;-)
So that's it! I have to admit that I'm not sure this is totally my style of stamping, but I am "curious" to investigate its possibilities! I'll have to play around with it to mix up my style a bit. Stay tuned to see what I do! Thanks for staying with me on this long post! I'd love to hear what you think!