The art adventures of Delia and Leslie, two friends from South Florida who enjoy being Virgos... and drive everyone else crazy along the way.



Thursday, July 26, 2012

Stamp Carving

Posted by Delia:

Today we worked on making stamps that we could use in our designs.
The steps to making a stamp are relatively easy:
1. Choose an image.
2. Use tracing paper over the image and color over image with black pencil on the tracing paper.
3. Transfer the image to the block by turning over the tracing paper and burnishing the image.
4. Once you lift off the tracing paper, you will see the areas that need to be removed or carved to create your stamp.

We gathered our supplies:
Carving tools and blocks. The pink carving block is Speedball brand and the white is Utrecht. The Speedball brand was more flexible and easier to work with. The Utrecht brand crumbed very easily.



Speedball hand press.



Here's Leslie making a stamp with a linoleum block. As you can see from the stamped image, it came out pretty good.

This is the stamp that I made from the Utrecht block. This was my first attempt to make a stamp. I probably should of started out with a less detailed image but I learned a lot and am definitely going to try it again.

Fabric Journal

Posted by Delia:

We decided that a great way to showcase our finished projects would be put them in a fabric journal. So the next step was to make the base pages of our fabric journal. I happen to have a drop cloth that I purchased at Harbor Freight. We liked the texture and weight of the drop cloth and decided to use it.

Here's the label from the drop cloth.
Leslie is cutting the drop cloth down to size. We decided on approximately 11" by 20" pages that would be folded in half. We are making six pages each to yield a twelve page journal (yeah, we are pretty ambitious).
Here I am sewing away!
Here are the two Virgos!
We needed to sew a seam around the edges of the fabric pages so that they would not fray.



Yay, one down, five more to go! Next we will decide how to bind the pages together.