Art House Display Guinea Pig Class

Yesterday afternoon I had a few "guinea pigs" over for a test run of an upcoming Stampaway class.  I designed this class so that everyone had the same set of supplies but was curious to see if they'd be uniquely different.

For a guinea pig class I put out 10 times what I'll pack for an actual out-of-state class, so options were overwhelming.  Roofing choices included vintage tickets, miniature playing cards, fortune cards & zodiac cards from old vending machines, Chance & Community Chest cards as well as Monopoly money, Funny money from another game, wooden sticks, wooden nickels, wooden tape measure pieces, cigar box bands, cigar bands, buttons, and a huge wooden cigar box filled with every kind of game piece from dominoes & checkers, to Monopoly houses & hotels, bingo markers, tiddly winks, and oodles more. 
I also had photocopies of old train tickets, war tokens, & tape measures of every color.  I just knew the tape measures would be a huge hit, but alas, I was mistaken.  Another option were photocopied sheets of letters and numbers, which were also not chosen.  At CHA there was a picket fence in the Ranger booth, with each picket stained a different color with their line of Distress Stains, so I put out coffee stir sticks as well as decorative wooden sticks which I could just envision stained and applied to the roof of a house.  I guess not seeing that picket fence in person explains why no one went for the wooden rooftop.

So the big surprise was that everyone used the vintage tickets.  Sharon & Michele went for the green ones while Mary went for faded red.  Sharon added cigar box bands at the top and on the edges.  Michele had her Martha Stewart fringe scissors so she used funny money on the eaves of her roof, which she turned into fringe.  Mary used a piece of corrugated cardboard across the peak of her roof as an accent.

Here's a close up of Sharon's roof, and I see she also included a row of the red tickets.

This is Mary's roof.  Notice how she turned her tickets to create the look of tiles overlapping one another.

And this is Michele's roof with the green tickets turned so that the holes were lined up on the outer edges.  But look closely at that fringed money.  Way cool!

Each kit also included strips of stamped tickets (images by Invoke Arts).  Mary used individual tickets on the back of her house  with rows of them under the eaves on the front.

Michele added a wooden nickel on the back and used the ticket strips on the front.

Sharon used ticket strips on the front but used just her metal elements and eco board on the back.

The final note I'd like to add was that I had a pack of 250 sheets of paper, with about 2 dozen already pulled out, and everyone made their selections from the ones I'd originally chosen.  Michele narrowed her choices down to 3, all with green, but in the end changed her mind and went with a collaged pattern in browns.
Sharon went with a beautiful blue, which isn't a color she uses much, but at the end, her color palette for the entire house could be found on the shirt she was wearing.
Mary had never taken a class with me and had certainly never been anyone's guina pig, so I really didn't know what to expect from her.  She worked slower, taking time to experiment with different embellishments, and that was interesting to watch.  When she commented that she wanted a clock to go with a ticket that read "the time is now", I pulled down a jar full of watch faces & parts.  The one she selected was white and everyone encouraged her to add color since nothing on the house matched that stark white.  And of course they were right as we pointed out options for adding color to metal.

A new product I brought home from CHA was Inka Gold by Viva.  This is a waxy colorant that you apply with your fingers and buff with a dry cloth.  Their advertising calls it a metal gloss paint, but it's not at all what you'd expect.  If you scroll back up and click on the individual photos of each house where Tim's Ideaology frames and coins are featured, the photo will enlarge so that you can look for the detail.

On Mary's frame she chose a green and applied it just on the oval ring of the frame.  On Michele's house she chose a pink and applied it in the same way on the frame but completely covered her metal coin that says Believe.   On Sharon's house she used gold and covered the entire metal frame.  In person, it was a fabulous yellow.  And when you look at that photo, look at the imagine coin.  She added the yellow over the entire thing and then highlighted with the pink.

I wasn't sure about packing them for the class but the girls made the decision for me.  It's a must have for everyone to try.

I confess that a bonus for me as an instructor is wandering around a classroom to view the color choices people make.  You can always find someone who loves purple in a large classroom, or the girls who go for the shabby chic look.

And while the houses were lovely I knew immediately that Michele would go home and continue to dress hers.  She never fails to impress me by finding exactly the right element that was missing.  Just last week she emailed to tell me she was still tweaking the art doll on the bookmark we made as our stamp club project, and I could just see that little girl coming to life under her expert hands.

So I'll be packing vintage tickets & stamped ticket strips in every kit for Cincinnati, but I'll also be packing some of all the other goodies just in case someone wants to take that road less traveled.

Will I see you there in my class?  Hope you've been inspired.  I certainly was, so a huge thank you to my guinea pigs.  You gals rock!!