St Paul Day 3: Metal Workshop

free motion quilting designs were this students inspiration for the peice with the leaves

My third class in St. Paul was Heavy Metal Play Day, I was so excited to finally have the opportunity to teach this class after planning it almost 2 years ago.

The first half of the class we concentrated on working with aluminum; embossing it by sampling the various tools in the kit, there are 10 different tips and embossing wheels, embossing the aluminum by rubbing over a leaf texture plate, coloring it with alcohol inks and alcohol based markers, then embossing pre-colored aluminum and sanding it to reveal the silver color on the raised design.

In the second half of class we worked on copper, creating a more detailed image. Because the copper squares are a heavier gauge, they are sturdier and able to handle a lot of elaborate texturing and embossing, giving the images a lot of dimension.

After the embossing was finished the copper was painted with alcohol inks and finally the embossed design was stabilized by adding a self hardening filler to keep it from getting crushed or dented.

One of the really wonderful things about this class is each student gets a metal tool kit courtesy of Walnut Hollow with several sheets of aluminum and copper, more than a $30 value, free.

I’ll be teaching this class at International Quilt Festival in Long Beach, Friday, July 29th. There are still a few spots left in the class if you’d like to join in the fun.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2011 at 1:13 PM. It is filed under student work and tagged with heavy metal play day, metal, student work, workshops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.