Hands on Fun at Winter CHA

Make and Takes are a fun part of CHA - after all, who doesn't want to play with new products!

Sometimes it's the great project which attracts you to a booth and sometimes it's a new product that gets you in but it's always enticing to come and play.

First up it's the DCWV booth which was offering a woven stretch bracelet made from Blue Moon Beads.

This was one of the quickest make and takes at the show: the bracelet was already made so all you had to do was attach the two charms by simply opening the jump rings, hooking them onto the elastic and closing them again. Nice and simple!

Whilst we're on bracelets, I want to show you the really fun slap bracelets they were making over at Leisure Arts.

This would be a fun activity for teenagers and I think the hardest part about this MITI was choosing which duct tape you wanted to work with! All you do is cut the duct tape to the length of your bracelet and then lay the bracelet down the centre of the tape. Fold over the sides, trim the ends and decorate to your heart's delight! I went over the top with the bling because it just seemed so right with the animal print!

Can you believe this is duct tape? It's incredible how cool duct tape has become!

Still on jewellery, here's another really quick project to complete.

At the DecoArt booth we created a fiery looking pendant using Crystal Gloss Enamels glass paint.

Once again, it was so easy to achieve a great result. The paint is applied to the back of the glass so you need to keep checking what it looks like from the front as you mix and swirl the paint with a toothpick. It was supposed to take about 1/2 an hour to dry but you can see my great big fingerprint in the middle of the pendant. I did that several hours later....... oops! But I'm sure I can hide it.

Over at Vintaj it was time to work with metal. We used a Sizzix die to run a piece of Vintaj artisan copper through the Big Kick machine to impress a pattern into the metal and then went to town using Ranger Patina and Glaze to colour it.The glaze dried in just a few minutes.

The final step was to sand away the embossed areas of the design revealing the lovely shiny metal underneath. It's so neat.

And my final jewellery type MITI was at the ImpressArt booth where we used metal stamps on stamping blanks. These are designed to work perfectly with the metal stamps. Hammering away on metal is a great way to let off steam and I do recommend you try this.

I'm saving this piece to do a bit more work on so I'll show how it turns out later on.

I'll have a few more make and takes to share with you later in the week. Hope you'll check back in!

'Til next time.....