A review of Walnut Hollow...

I've been down and out the last few days. I've caught the cold and can't seem to shake the snuffles. So no art today but I promised a review of the new Walnut Hollow Creative Metal products a few weeks ago and here it is... I bought the mini tool set, which came with 6 interchangeable points to use. It's a 8 piece set, the interchangeable points, another one being the long tube you screw the pieces into and the last being a foam mat. I thought this would be a real economical way to get people into metal effects. The cost of the set is only about $9 + change but while it's a cool idea to have one tool with interchangeable pieces, I wasn't happy with it. The tube that you hold is too thin to continually hold for long. While I was using it the stylus piece started to unscrew, which as you can imagine was annoying. They don't have a pointed tip for real fine refining, just the small ball stylus. The set also comes with a ball and cup so essentially you get two balls with the kit. One smaller than the other. There's a deerfoot used for erasing and two different small wheels. OK, there's another problem with this set. There's no place to put all the small pieces. The set just comes in plastic packaging and once you open it, the packaging doesn't snap together so the pieces float about. I can just see myself loosing all those pieces.

I purchased the mat set as well. For only $5 + change, this was a good deal. The foam is a similar density and size to that of the one from 10 Seconds Studio. The acrylic mat isn't as sturdy as the one from 10 Seconds but it'll still do nicely. It's actually pretty flexible but still has a nice density that will allow anyone to create wonderfully pieces of shiny, metal art on it.

Now for the worst part. I actually paid good money on the "Design Sheets" and "Design Borders". They were about $5 a package and each package included "3 unique plastic design sheets". But the plastic is so thin and so pliable, you can't get a good image on the metal. I'm not sure you'd get a good image on paper, either. The impressions on the plastic were too deep as well. Deep images coupled with thin plastic make not a great surface for embossing metal. I was extremely disappointed about this. I was hoping that Walnut Hollow would make some decent metal molds. Oh, well. It's too bad too as I kinda liked some of their mold designs.

After trying these products from Walnut Hollow, I'm still partial to my 10 Seconds Studio products and will remain so. If you'd like to try metal effects and, I still recommend 10 Second Studios for all your metal crafting needs.