This is inspired by Sid Dicken's Memory Blocks, I have a few of these and love love love them. I constructed a set of my own blocks with a bit of foam, paper mache, modeling paste and the Architecture Column Spellbinder's Die (S4-122). I used some foam that was packing material, cut it down to size, covered it with newspaper and paper mache. When dry, I added texture with modeling paste, but left some of the newsprint revealed. When that was dry I painted the whole piece with Twinkling H20's, you can't really see the glimmery effect in the photo, but IRL its there. I stamped with an Autumn Leaves swirly set.

The word JOY is cut from Amaco Pewter and chipboard. I edged the chipboard with black ink then glued the metal letter to it. The font is Spellbinder's Caesar Font (L1-01), one of my favorites. I also backed the column with chipboard in the same way.

Working with Pewter is great fun, but be sure to wash your hands afterwards. The wonderful thing about embossing dies is that you can do so much with so many materials. First I cut and embossed the pewter in my Wizard. Normally with metal, that's all you need to do to get a beautiful crisp emboss. But pewter is a soft metal and it stretches if you work with it. I left the pewter die cuts in the die after I embossed it and grabbed a stylus tool. I set the front side of the die on top of my tan embossing pad (included with your Wizard) and from the back side of the die, using it as a stencil, I traced the embossing outline into the pewter. No need to "color" in the inside of the embossed area, just going along the outline will stretch the metal. Turn it over and you will love the result. Assemble by adhering to the chipboard, then glue the chipboard to the block and you are good to go!

As in the license plate on the Almost 13 layout below, I knew I was taking this to CHA and I wanted to protect the pewter from curios hands. Before attaching the pewter to the chipboard, I filled the back side with liquid glue and allowed it to dry. The glue hardens and fills up the embossed areas and keeps people from pushing fingers into the embossing.

If you need some photos of the steps, leave a comment and I'll get some shots. I'm between cleaning and baseball today, but I will check back!

Thanks for looking!

Beth