Charms, Charms everywhere!

Let the madness begin!

I’m counting down the days until I’m on Freedom of the Seas and Crafting with Tim Holtz and all my friends.  While I’m counting, I’m creating . . charms, that is!

Almost done!

I’ve joined the charm swap (really out of my comfort zone, but I’m challenging myself) and at last count we’re up to 31 swappers!  Thought you might like to see what I’m creating.  One of the rules of the swap was that we had to use Tim Holtz products in our charms.  Here’s what I came up with.

I used 1inch memory frames and cut up some Idea-Ology paper from the Lost & Found Stack.   Tore a strip of solid paper and adhered it to one edge and stuck a tiny flower down with Stickles. Printed one of my favorite sayings from one of his stamps to use on the back of the charm and added a bead at the bottom.   I can’t wait to see what every one else made!  I know just where the charms are going.  More about that in the next post. 

Adding beads

There’s also a general swap going on that’s a little less structured.  You just sign up, create what you want and meet to swap.  There are ATC’s, charms, tags and mini-albums coming to be traded.  That should be fun too.  I created something different for this swap.  It didn’t need to be a Tim product, and since I wanted to play with Shrinky Dinks, I did shrinky-dink charms.  I used the image from the Scrap Map page that advertised the Holtz Cruise, jammed a bunch of them together on one page and printed it. Experimented with shrinking these down with my heat gun instead of a toaster oven.  I won’t be using the oven any more. Like the control I have when I do it with the heat gun! 

Before they get shrunk, the still need holes for the jump ring

As they came out of the printer

in the box to get a spray protective coat!

Had to play with it a while to get it right but now that I know what I’m doing, I’m thinking it’ll make a cool class for Paper Niche.