 Hi everyone and welcome back, now I'm currently on summer vacation but I thought it would be fun to schedule a video like this one which is actually a review of the glass media mat by Tim Holtz and posted when it is back in stock. So if you want to grab this glass mat now it is available with a discount and you will find a link down below in the description area as well as on my blog. Now before I go ahead with the review and the comparison I just need to let you all know that this is not a sponsored video, I wasn't paid to do this review, I just do it because I love the mat and I have been using it for months and months. Now before using this glass mat I have been using another glass mat which is this one by Tonic Studios as well. Both glass mats have pretty much the same attributes but there are some differences so the size is the same but in this white one the grid is in centimeters so everything here is in centimeters except of this part which is in inches. I did the review a while back on this white glass mat and you will find a link somewhere up on my screen. So if you are used to working with centimeters then probably this glass mat is perfect for you and you will find a link down below for this glass mat as well. So now let's talk a little bit about the new design by Tim Holtz. The size is 23 inches and 3 quarters by 14 inches and 1 quarter which is exactly the same as the previous white glass mat. Now let's talk a little bit about the grid. Now as you can see there are markings 14 inches by 12 inches each little square is 1 inch by 1 inch. And there is a cross in the middle so you can easily find the center just because those two lines are bold and you can use them to center things. At the top it starts from 0 all the way to 7 both ways from the center towards outside left and right but at the bottom the 0 is in the beginning and goes all the way to 14. Now if you look outside of the grid you will find measurements for centimeters. So if you want to use this Tonic Studios Tim Holtz glass mat and you are used into working with centimeters you can still can. Otherwise you can go and use the white one with the centimeters all over the grid. Now let's talk a little bit about the glass type. This is actually tempered glass which is really durable and it takes heat as well as cutting on top of it and I will demonstrate those later on but let's take a look underneath. Now there are rubber feet or silicone feet that allows your glass to stick on top of your area and it doesn't move at all on you. I have been using it for months and I know that for sure and everything is printed underneath so no matter how harsh you are on the top don't worry at all about fading out those grid lines. Another feature that I love is that it has rounded edges so I don't grab my hand on that corner there and I also like that it is slightly raised just because it has those rubber feet underneath I also like to keep it on top of my other glass mat so it is even higher than normal and I find that this helps my main area that I work on to stay clean so all I do is just throw things out of the glass mat and everything remains clean and it doesn't find its way back to my area. When I'm filming I like to throw things out of the camera view so you always get focused on the project that I am using and not on the mess that I have all around. Now you can also use your craft knife and cut directly on top of this glass without caring at all about leaving scratches behind. You can use a craft knife as I'm doing here or you can use a rotary cutter on top of this glass mat they glide nicely on top of the glass and they give you a good clean cut. Now there is a debate on how quicker the craft knife will get dull when you work on top of a glass instead of a self healing mat. To tell you the truth I haven't noticed any difference but I don't do this type of cutting a lot so it works for me. I usually work with scissors to cut out things. And let's talk a little bit about blending. This is one of my favorite techniques and I go back to it again and again. I like how the blending tool glides on top of the glass mat so I always start outside of the paper and I bring in the color slowly towards the paper. This gives me a beautiful blend and I get no resistance when the blending tool is at the glass. And since I have this ink on top of my glass I am going to clean it quickly with a cloth that is totally dry cloth, no water at all and it wipes right off. On the right side of your glass mat you get a white palette with 25 different little grid squares and they also give you a non-stick craft mat. I'm going to talk a little bit about it later on this video when you need to use it and when you shouldn't and why I like to use it on certain techniques. So since everything is black in this glass mat it's nice to have a white area to use as a palette where you can see the true color. So all I'm doing here is apply a little bit of this ink and I'm using the stress oxides here. You can see the real color you can pick it up with water and a water brush. You can use pretty much any type of medium to create your palettes like the stress oxide or dye ink or here I'm using my zig clean markers. You can even use watercolor pens to create your palette and nothing is going to quickly dry since this is glass. It is not going to absorb your medium and it will stay wet so that you have plenty of time to work with it. Now you can also apply alcohol markers on top of it if you want to do those techniques where you pick some color with another marker and I'm using a couple of brands here and no matter the brand alcohol inks will wipe off your glass mat. So once you have your palette ready you can use water to mix up things directly on top. You can pick up color etc. Do whatever you like and don't be afraid you will not stain your mat no matter what. Now about cleaning. These mediums obviously aren't dry totally dry yet so I'm going to use my dry cloth and go over it. This is going to clean it nicely as you can see. The only thing that is still there is the alcohol marker. So I'm just going to apply some water. This is water not alcohol and it wipes right off. You find that some stains don't come off just use hand sanitizer. So now again I'm going to apply different types of mediums like pastes. I'm going to start with this dress crayon. I'm going to move on to this paste. This is actually glue with glitter. This is glimmer paste. I'm also going to apply some acrylic paint and also a little bit of gesso and I'm going to leave them there to dry so you can see how I'm going to remove them. Now I will move on and show you what you can do with alcohol inks. I work with my alcohol inks directly on this glass mat and I never had problems so you can see I have applied a little bit of that directly on the glass mat and I'm going to leave everything to dry there. And here is where I thought that why not let's apply some archival ink which is quite of a pain to remove just to have that on the palette as well. So I will leave all these mediums to dry at the right there and I will move on and show you that you can apply heat directly on this glass mat without having any problems. This was a main problem for me for back in the days when I was using a self healing mat because if you apply heat on a self healing mat I don't know if that happened ever happened to you but at least with the ones I had were creating bumps all over the place and they ruined my mats and I had to change quite a few of them because I was making the same mistake again and again. So you can see here I'm using my heat gun directly on the glass mat and I have no problems at all. Now back to cleaning these mediums are there for quite a while now so most of them are dry. I will try to wipe them off with just a dry paper towel. Now I'm using some water and I will go back with my cloth and you can see that I can easily wipe off most of them but for that this is actually glue and glitter and it's totally stuck there. I'm just going to scrape everything off with my spatula and again use some hand sanitizer if you find that some of those stains are quite persistent. Otherwise you can see I managed to remove everything with my spatula and some water. Now the glass mat comes with this non stick mat that you can stick all over the place. It sticks nicely it kind of clings there. If you find that after some time of using it it doesn't click on you just wash it and it's going to be like a brand new. Now on this removable mat there are some do's and don'ts so one thing I need to let you know is to stay away from alcohol links. If you apply alcohol links on the removable mat then it's going to leave stains and you won't be able to clean it completely. You just use your glass area directly if you work with alcohol links. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about why I love using the removable mat for certain techniques so I have just applied a little bit of pha ink, distress oxide ink on the removable mat and directly on my glass there. I applied water on both areas and I don't know if you can tell from the camera that the one on the removable mat beats up while the other one stays together. But it is watered down. Now I'm going to use some watercolor paper, I'm just going to cut it in half and I'm just going to apply it in both areas just to pick up a first layer of color. And now what I want you to see is what is remained on the mats. Here you can see that everything beats up while on the glass you don't get this effect. So depending on the look that you want you can go back and pick up all those beats while on the second one you cannot get the beats as everything comes together. So both ways work but depending on the look that you want and if you want to get some droplets on your project then use the removable mat. Now the glass takes heat so you can use your heat tools as well as your hot glue gun and the silicone wipes off quickly from the surface you can also use your fuse tool. And finally one thing that I love about the glass mat is that I can easily remove glue. I end up having glue all over the place so either I just rub it with my finger it comes right off or you can use one of those adhesive erasers. Either way I find that just rubbing out everything works perfectly fine. To conclude I have to say that I have been working on glass mats for about a year now and I am super happy with them and I will never go back to self healing mats. So I hope this review was helpful for you to find out if this glass mat is for you or not. Thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you next time.