Frugally homemade Distress ink tools...

When I first became a HUGE fan of T!m Holtz, I tried a few of my "frugal" tricks including making my own distress ink tools so I could spend more of my hard earned $$ on the inks themselves.

Since there has been alot of discussion on this subject over on the ATT (All things Tim) yahoo group, I thought I'd share a few pics of my version of this tool.

I started with the regular round disk cosmetic sponges, a sheet of fun foam, some velcro (from a fabric/craft store), and some good liquid glue (I used 3 in 1 Beacon glue).  I used 2" square blocks as the base for my tool.  I found these at a scrapbooking garage sale and picked up a set of 9 for only $2.

As you can see, this "distressing tool" has gotten alot of use (notice the ink that seeped up the sides?).  I glued a piece of fun foam trimmed down to size, then attached the "tooth" side of the velcro (this had a self adhesive backing, and I did make sure to buy the heavy duty velcro).  I then cut the other side of the velcro down to size and attached it to one side of a cosmetic foam.  Then I trimmed the cosmetic sponge to square, too.

I do have to say that the cosmetic sponges aren't quite as good as the TH distressing pads, but hey, when you can get a bag of 100 of these cosmetic sponges for under $5, I'm good with the lesser quality.

These sponges do work for a while, and I noticed when they were "done", I could just pull them off of the velcro backing and glue another sponge on the velcro using the 3 in 1 Beacon glue (fabric tac would also work).

I even got creative and thought I'd decorate my homemade distress ink tools...but the novelty quickly wore off, lol...

Now that I teach "Tim" classes via my Frugal Scrappin' classes, I have "graduated" to the official distress tools, but I still use my homemade tools as well.  I have found that my homemade tools AND the Tim tools play very well together, lol...

You may notice that I have also labeled my distress tools AND distress inks...this has REALLY been a LIFESAVER and TIMESAVER for me.  I just used a plain white sticker page (with no individual labels) and typed a list using the "table" function in Word.  Then I could cut the strips to size.  I have just about enough "tools" to have one for each color of my distress inks.

enJOY:)