This 4-week home study course schedule will walk you through several of our how-to articles and include challenges for you in the areas of distressing and altering. I know that some of you already have experience altering and distressing, so it may seem pretty basic to you. I hope to give you some hints and tips that will enhance what you already know. Those of you who have never altered anything or have altered very little, we hope to inspire you to go out of your box and start changing things up a bit!

There is no charge to take part in our classes. Anyone may join in at any time! Remember to share your work in our gallery and report in the forum to your instructor so we can encourage you on your altered journey! You could win a prize for your participation too! Participation drawings for those who have completed the course take place each month. You may take the class as many times as you would like. You may win a prize only once per sponsor.

Incentives donated by:

Altered Arts Magazine (a subscription)
Memory Villa (something creative from their store)
PageSage (one of their great altered themed DVD's)

Verb 1. alter - cause to change; make different; cause a transformation

My plan over the next 4 weeks is to introduce you to some techniques and products that will "alter" your projects in some way. We'll move from basic to advanced with the final project being something truly altered from its original state! I hope that you'll plan to join us through this altered journey. (I'm a big Tim Holtz fan, can you tell? :D )

Your instructor for this class is Andrea Cloutier, team manager at ScrapFriends, and the creator of Alterable Magnetic Easels.

Week 1 Using ink to distress and alter your layouts.

Week 2 Crumpling and Sanding; These are two very important altering techniques as we move from just adding color to the project, but now TEXTURE!

Week 3 Embellishments; We have added ink, crumpled, sanded and now we're adding more texture and DIMENSION to our pages using embellishments.

Week 4 We will continue working with embellishments this week, but add a new twist!

If you enjoy our altered course, we recommend you take a look at the PageSage DVD's featuring Tim Holtz, An Altered Journey and The Journey Continues. They are available for purchase from MemoryVilla.