I'm leaving Milwaukee today. After 10 days away, I'm looking forward to getting home. In the meantime, this is an article that I wrote for Craft Critique....
The moment I saw the Tim Holtz Idea-ology Texture Hammer advertised online, I knew that I had to have it. The package describes it as, “an instrument used to give texture to grungeboard, papers, metal, and more to achieve a distinctive texture or character.” The package contains the hammer, four interchangeable tips, and a mat.
The hammer itself is surprisingly lightweight. As for the tips, Tim Holtz gives you four of them: rubber, metal, dots, and lines. At the store I bought the hammer from, their website says that the rubber tip is for smoothing, the metal tip is for flattening and attaching, the dots are for a bumpy texture, and the lines are for a canvas texture. Each of the tips screws on and off of the double-sided hammer (so you can have two of the tips attached at any given time). Switching them out is incredibly easy and does not require any particular finger strength. The mat is a hard little square that’s meant to take a beating. Mine became fairly nicked up after light use, but that doesn’t seem to affect its usability.
Here are the results of my road testing:
On Grungeboard
In his online tutorial Tim Holtz recommends wetting your grungeboard before you hammer it. He says that it holds the texture better. He’s right. However, I discovered that if you hammer while the paint on the grungeboard is wet, it behaves in the same way as if you had spritzed it with water. For my personal taste, the dots tip does the best job at distressing the grungeboard, dinging it up to look like metal.
On Chipboard
Chipboard takes the texture hammer much more literally than grungeboard does. You can see each dot and stripe, rather than a general distressing. I found that water or wet paint definitely makes for a stronger impression here as well.
On Metal
I love, and this is not an exaggeration, love, love, love how the dot tip dings up brads and makes them look all smushed and old. The metal tip does a great job of flattening out wire. I do a lot of jewelry work, so I’m very familiar with working with wire and a hammer and this tip does a nice job. If you do a lot of jewelry, I would recommend a texture hammer with a longer handle (you don't have to use as much force). One note: I found that the tips had little to no effect on certain harder metals. However most papercrafting embellishments are made from tin, so there’s no problem.
On Paper
I used both the dots and lines tips on paper and I love the distressed results. Two tips: use a mouse pad instead of the mat that comes with the hammer, and wet the paper a bit for best results.
After playing with the texture hammer for a few days, I have a few thoughts to share:
1. It’s noisy. I know it’s a hammer, but unlike an anywhere hole punch, you are banging repeatedly over and over and over again. So, it’s not a late night tool.
2. I never really discovered a use for the rubber tip. Maybe if I had made jewelry instead of papercrafting items….
3. I like the dots tip the best. It’s the most effective on the most surfaces and I’m sure I’ll use it a lot.
4. Tim Holtz recommends that you use the lines tip at an angle, rather than straight on but I didn’t see a huge difference between the two stroke types.
In the end, for me, the texture hammer is lots of fun, but I’m not sure how much I’ll use it. It seems like one of those tools that I’ll enjoy when I remember to use it. But, it’s not an every day, every project kind of tool.
Here are some of my experiments:
THE GOOD GIRL
I used the texture hammer on the grungeboard title, the chipboard flower, the large brown brad, and the wire stems.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY CARD
I used the texture hammer on the paper flowers and the brad centers.
