fun times at ink about it…

3  well bloggers, i'm home from a wonderful weekend at ink about it.  a sincere thank you to lori and linda (the owners) their great staff, and the incredibly talented students.  i had such a great time in the classes – what a way to end the year of store visits!  thank you everyone.  one of the cool things that we got to do this trip was actually head out there a day early!  i know it's usually not in the cards for me to add a day to a store visit but since i was teaching on friday and saturday instead, it just worked out flight wise.

so…guess what we got to do???
we headed to brimfield, mass. for a HUGE and i mean seriously HUGE antique show that happens 3 times a year and completely takes over this tiny town.  the store owners mentioned it to me a while back and said if there was any way i could make it there a day early, the brimfield show was starting on thursday – if there's a will, there's a way!  2 of their employees mary and karen were kind enough to be our guides for the day and had it all figured out.  then, our good friend nadine heard that we were going to be in mass. so she decided to take the day off from work, drive down from new york, and spend the day with us in brimfield.  perfect!

we flew in on wednesday night and headed straight to the hotel since we had an early start the next morning to head to brimfield (we're talking up at 5:30am early, which is 2:30am arizona time…)  we all met up at the hotel the next morning and set out in our mini caravan (mary, karen, nadine, mario, and i) for a day of antiquing, treasure hunting, and hopefully buying!  what an incredible experience.  tents everywhere, piles and piles of vintage goods, ephemera, furnishings, artwork – you name it…it was there.  of course not everything was within my price range though, but it was sure fun to look.

we walked and walked for about 7 hours through fields, backyards, and rows after rows of booths and truckloads of stuff – really incredible! they had food booths set up there, kettle corn, the works so we all met for lunch about midway through the day.  then we were off for more shopping adventures.  by the time we met back at the car, we all had found a few things we couldn't live without.  i ended up with some rusty tins, old books, and a cool childs wooden push sled – what a deal.  such a great day – here are some photos nadine took of the day (thanks nadine for ALWAYS having your camera!)…

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then we headed back to the store to get set up for classes, but our other friend jenn was still teaching her class at the store so we headed out for a quick dinner and then back to the store to get set.  we got all unpacked and everything set and ready for the classes.  karen created this cool welcome banner for us complete with my face stuck into some of my craziest stamp images – what a riot!  thanks karen!  the next morning started off with alcohol inks where students learned all there is to know about alcohol inks and of course the fillable pen.  then we created nostalgic memoirs as we learned book binding and covered the book with embossed metal from ten seconds studio.  day two was all about ranger and idea-ology starting with all things idea-ology where the students created numerous wearable pieces from the embellishments of the idea-ology line.  then we created the final patchwork pandemoinum – this has been a popular class where we did tons of ranger techniques on grungeboard and made a colorful patchwork wall art piece from grunge and grungepaper.  everyone's turned out great!  so now we're home for a few days before out next adventure.  thanks again to everyone…t!m

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Tim Holtz Creative Chemistry 101