Charmed Possessions Necklace - Part 1

One of the great things about taking classes from Tim Holtz is that you don't need to bring anything to class.  You just show up ready to create - Tim, Mario and the rest of the team have everything waiting and ready for you.

While the class groups were quite large (90 people) the room is set up with work stations for groups of four.  There is a large screen and Tim wears a microphone so he is easy to hear no matter where he happens to be in the room.  It doesn't really matter where you sit since he wanders the room constantly.

This is the set up for a group of four.  The three larger baskets in the center held inkpads, distress stains, Perfect Pearls mist, alcohol inks, paint dabbers, etc., to share between the four people.  The small baskets had supplies for the two people on either side.  There was a good variety of colors and you could also trade with a neighboring group if they had something you wanted.  Special items needed for certain classes were added at each session.  Everyone had a non stick craft mat to work on - this really is an essential tool for many of the techniques.

For each class there was a kit with a set of printed instructions and neatly labelled and measured "ingredients" for the project.  These were the items in the "Charmed Possessions" necklace kit.

In this class we learned lots of different way to make and alter embellishments.  If you remember my question from a couple of days ago, the beads were made with the plastic tubing at the bottom of this photo.

We used various styles of tissue tape and wrapped it around the tubing, overlapping slightly to fully cover the tube.  Then we cut the tube at the width of the tape and continued on to make 12 little segments.

We used a blending tool and any color of distress ink we wanted to color the tape.  Tissue tape is not designed to stick to itself (otherwise it would be hard to get it off the roll!) so we needed to seal the beads.  We applied some Multi-Medium over the inked tape  to seal the beads.  To avoid contaminating the bottle, we placed some multi-medium on the craft mat and brushed it on one color at a time (you can see the leftovers of my red bead coating on the mat).  The ink is reactive with water so they were a little messy but they dried to a nice even color.  The brushes had to be collected and put in water right away or else the brushes would have been sealed and ruined.

The beads were set aside to dry and by the time we were ready to assemble the necklaces, they were ready.  At this point, we cut each segment in half to make 24 little beads.  These were used as spacers for the charms on the necklace.

Tim is great at leading everyone through the process while allowing us to make our own choices about how we want our project to turn out.   He explains how to do things and why we need to use certain products and then turns up the music while the class gets creative.  He has such a great attitude about creating (embrace imperfection!) and a perpetual twinkle in his eye as he encourages everyone to experiment with all of the goodies in front of them.

We made some fragment charms for the necklace, choosing four shapes from a nice variety that was in our kit (the rest we took home for future projects).

There were baskets with pieces of 2 x 2 papers that we could select as the background of the charms.  We "auditioned" the placement until we found a spot that the charm framed nicely.

We applied Glossy Accents on the back of the clear fragments and pressed them over the paper at the spots we had chosen.  You need to hold the piece down for a little while to make sure it stickes evenly with no bubbles.  Then we trimmed away some of the extra paper.

Next, we placed the paper side of the charms on a strip of clear packing tape - the kind you buy for packages on a huge roll.  The tape seals the paper on the back which would otherwise be exposed to water and skin oils on the charm necklace.

After the pieces were taped, we trimmed away the excess paper as closely as possible to the edges of the charms.  You could stop here and just sand the edge a bit to make sure the charm was smooth.

We used metal foil tape in copper that had some patina added to wrap each charm. 

The class involved lots of techniques for altering and making charms - I'll show the rest in Part Two.

One more photo - we had the option of ordering boxed lunches and they included these delicious cake balls - almost too pretty to eat!

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