TA DA - I'm a certified

metal work teacher! (Did you think I was going to say NUT?) I spent all day yesterday, along with several co-workers from Recollections, at a certification workshop at Ten Seconds Studio. This is an awesome company that makes metal sheets, plastic molds, and metal-working tools to make amazing art pieces. The best part is their studio is only a few miles from me and we carry their products in the store. They demo at scrapbooking and stamping conventions - check out their website: http://www.tensecondsstudio.com/.

For the certification, we made a wonderful "sample" book using all the techniques. We had a mock-up to follow and could add our own touches to it. The book was made with black matboard and opens in the center with both the right and left sides spiral bound with the new Bind-it-All machine.

Here's mine. The first photo is the cover which we first sliced in half. We then embossed a sheet of black metal, sanded the front side and spackled the back side (to prevent the raised areas from "sinking"). This was then adhered to the front matboard covers.

The first page was also cut in half and the edges were diecut. I used wings and lined them up to meet at the edges. A large sheet of metal tape was embossed (the "Art is life" I wrote backwards on the back side so it would be in relief and readable on the front), colored with alcohol inks, sanded and adhered to the matboard pages. The heart is a matboard diecut covered with embossed, colored with alcohol ink and suspended in the opening with fishing line threaded through eyelets. (Sorry the scan didn't turn out well because of the metal.) You can see a bit of the next page through the opening.

The third page is only bound on the left side. The right side was randomly cut with a diecut to give an uneven edge. Rubons were used on this page, but, since they were black, they didn't show up well, so I went over them with a silver gel pen. Two embossed and alcohol-inked hearts were added and the wings outlined with white dots using a Galaxy marker. This can be seen from the previous page. Next are two half-page pocket pages. One is bound on the left side and one is bound on the right. The half diamond cuts on the top edge of the pockets was cut with a diecut machine. The silver diamonds on the edges of the pages are metal tape as is the title block on the right page. The words on the left page are stamped and silver embossed. (We were supposed to take notes during class to put in here, but we didn't have time! You can see my pages are blank!) This page is a hand diecut from matboard and is bound on the left side. It is covered with tan metal embossed and sanded. On the back I stamped and silver embossed "Trust your crazy ideas" - no photo. You can see the last page peeking through. Here's an extra I did - I embossed a diecut red metal heart and attached it to the back of one of the note pocket pages.The last page was left blank - so we could add our handmade certificate at the end of class! Cheryl and her daughter, Megan, made each of us one of these to adhere in our books! Classy.



And here's the back cover. It was supposed to be blank, but I hate to throw anything out, so I used the metal tape cutouts from the wing page and mounted them here along with two small hearts. Interesting side note: these were colored with alcohol ink but when I burnished them after adhereing them to the back, all the ink was removed!



I loved this class and love my book. What a great memento of a fun time as well as a great reminder of all the techniques!