Saturday, December 15, 2007

Texture tutorial - how to make door handles

As part of the Ranger Design Team this past year, I had the honor of attending a weekend retreat with all the other designers. Robin Beam, Suze Weinburg and Tim Holtz were the facilitators and it was just nothing short of a dream weekend!!! While there, I think my brain was overwhelmed....I learned so much! And now, perhaps time to share and pass it along?

One of the things Tim did to add texture was show us his little hammer that he now has for sale thru Advantus. But when I came back home, I created my own version of it! I went to Lowes and purchased 2 rubber mallets for $1.98 each. On one side, I hammered in a bunch of "u" shaped nails:



On the other side, I stapled those big heavy duty staples into it.



On the next hammer, I did tiny round head brass nails. As you can see, I started pretty close together and then tapered them out....so if I hammer with each side of this, I get a different look. You can cover a pretty large area as these were the large mallets.



Next thing I did was ask Accucut for the die that cuts hinges. Now, I don't have an accucut machine, but there's a local shop and we did some trading and she let me bring it over there and cut tons of hinges. You need 4 of the same hinge to make one of these little door handles (did I mention yet that's what we're making? LOL!)



Seems like I never take enough photos, so just use your imagination for the next few steps:

1. Using a glue stick (cheap one from Walmart), glue all 4 pieces together, one on top of the next.
2. Spritz the top with water
3. Pound into the top....it will give it texture.
4. Shape it to look like a 3D hinge. Let dry
5. Finger rub some perfect pearls across it. Using black paper and silver pearls.....it looks like an old metal door handle!



And here's a closer look at them:



Now, one of these days, I'll do something to put these handles on....just wanted to share this fun little technique. I'm sure you could use the hammer on any chipboard embellishment....just spritz the piece, hammer into it and go from there!!

You know, with all these tutorials that I'm posting, there's really no excuse to not play, is there? OK....send me what you do with this technique and I'll post it here!

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