Stamp Carving

Adigraf plastic cutting block is a thick flexible sheet of plastic designed for creating printing blocks.  It requires no preparation before carving like lino, which needs to be warmed with an iron to make it maleable enough to carve.  Pieces can be cut to size with scissors and standard lino cutting tools with a selection of cutter sizes allowed easy carving.

I worked on a cutting mat while carving.  Other equipment and materials used were tracing paper, graph paper, a soft pencil, marker pen, craft knife and scissors (the cutting block is also easy to cut).

Sketching out some layouts for an ATC swap I  designed some lettering for the cards - 'flora'  'fauna' and 'atc' using graph paper.  Rembering you have to carve a reverse image, the lettering was transcribed to tracing paper and transferred from the tracing paper onto the plastic with a pencil. 




Swapping the sizes of cutter depending on whether fine detail or larger areas were being cut, a little experimenting was needed to gauge how deep to cut and how much pressure is required, so it is worth carving some test pieces, if only to save your fingers.

First carving attempts......



....and this is how they stamp (this is the back of the ATC)

I love the way the imperfections of the carving end up leaving little spots and flecks of ink when the image is stamped, it gives a 'handprinted' feel.

The finished cards made for the art swap, mixed the handcarved stamps with a selection of other rubberstamps, inks, some drawn embellishments, punched shapes and pre-printed images of different flora and fauna.

 

The handcarved stamp gave a much clearer image when using permanent ink such as Versafine or Archival.  Waterbased dye ink tended to pool on the material, so didn't stamp as well.  It depends on what type of finish you are looking for. 

 

With some of the stamping I used a fibre tipped pen to highlight the lettering.

After I posted the carvings and images on Facebook some talented ladies at EmilyLoves and Urbanknitter asked me to carve some stamps for them.  Looking through their photos I came up with a couple of designs. 

Initial Carve

Getting very impatient to see how the stamp looks, I usually do a few test stamps along the way.  During the later carving it helps to identify any little bits of rubber making marks you don't want in the final print.

The carving of 'Y' and 'E' seem to be a bit of a challenge.  On the Emily Loves stamp, though, I do like the lack of uniformity in the letters, it reflects the stitched label I trying to copy.

Final Stamp and Image

The stencil style lettering of Urbanknitter, I thought would be easier to carve.  It wasn't.  Trying to keep the lines really straight was a problem as the plastic tends to 'squish' as you are carving it.  The tricky letter on this one was 'K'. 

Test Print

After this test print it was really tempting to leave the carve at this point, without removing the remaining plastic to the right of the heart. You can get some really interesting images and patterns around the lettering during the carving.

I like the finished stamp though, it was definitely a bit distressed and grungy in style. 

Finished Stamp and sketches for Urbanknitter

Urbanknitter's Photo of the Stamps and Packaging

I also had a go at a stamp for me, so here is my Crafter's Laboratory stamp.  I cut this much more roughly, not bothering too much about cutting too far on the joins of the letters and even left bits of edges of the plastic top and bottom.

This is the material I will be trying to carve next.  Speedball produce a rubber sheet about 1cm thick designed for carving, called 'Speedy-Carve'.  It will be interesting to see how stamps carved from this material differ from the Adigraf sheet.

New Home Card

 

A 'New Home' card modelled on a tatty old wall with peeling, dirty wallpaper.

A piece of scrapbook paper which reminded me of wallpaper was stuck onto a piece of card with PVA, then a few strips of the paper were peeled away and curled.  Where the cream card was exposed under the paper, a scrap of some brown patterned paper was ripped into a rough shape to fit the gap and stuck down with PVA.

With a steel edged ruler and an awl. Lines were scored at regular intervals across paper to mimic the joins in wallpaper.  Along one of the score lines some of the pattern paper was lifted and torn.

Using some foam, brown Distress Ink (Walnut Stain) was applied around the patterned paper, especially over the torn and roughed up areas.  A void where a picture frame hangs was created by cutting a Post-It in the shape of the picture frame, sticking it to the paper and inking over the top.

An image for the picture frame was also 'aged' with the Walnut Stain ink.

The picture frame was prepared using Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel (UTEE) of various marbled colours poured from a melting pot into a silicon mould.  This was mounted with glue gel over the aged picture, at an angle to the 'clean' area of the fake wallpaper.  An old gold brad created the picture hook and the chain was drawn in by hand with fibre tipped pen.

To finish off the card, NEW HOME letters were cut from cream card using a die and stuck to the front.

 

The panel was then mounted onto a card folded from an A4 sheet of cream card.

The Colour Red

The Colour Red ATC Swap - February 2014

Productivity has been fairly low lately - although I have been working on some wedding invitations which I'm not allowed to share for a while yet.

However, with a little inspiration from Blue Jelly Stampin  and some free stamps from the cover of 'Get Stamping' magazine Issue 7, I got to work on my first ATC swap of the year.

The free stamps with the magazine were really good quality clear stamps and the sheet of nineteen stamps all had an Oriental theme.

Blue Jelly's layout in the magazine had some really fun co-ordinated ideas for a party using the free stamps, including bunting, party bags and table decorations.

The ATC swap this month, was with the theme 'The Colour Red'.  This always make me think Oriental, so with my hands on the freebies from the magazine, I got to work on a few cards for the swap.

With only a little time left to get my cards in for the swap, I kept the ATCs really simple.  The main images were stamped onto white card in Versamark ink and heat embossed with black embossing powder.  The intensity of black you get with a heat embossed image is a great contrast to the red.

Red Distress ink was applied with a foam applicator to each card for the backgrounds, more ink was applied to the edges to get a deeper colour.

Added to the backgrounds were stamps of tiny cherry blossoms from the magazine stamp set and a couple of starburst stamps from Hero Arts (Single Starburst, wooden block) in the same red ink.

Different shades of red ink were applied using fibre tipped and gelli pens to the open areas, like some of the cherry blossoms, lanterns or parts of the Zentangle stamp.

The lanterns were stamped and embossed on a separate piece of card, coloured with red ink and cut out.  These were then mounted overlapping each other using dimensional glue gel.

 

 

My favourite one of the four is the crane.  This card isn't actually going off to the swap, but will hopefully still find it's way to a special member of our swap group. 



Inspiration from an Art Swap

One of my ATC swap themes, almost a year ago now, was 'Stitching, Real or Fake'.

With a broken sewing maching, I was going down the 'fake' route, but after looking through my stamps there were a number of images I thought would work really well with some embroidery stitches.

As with a lot of these things, they seem to evolve - choosing certain colours or stamp style, adding a bit of this and a bit of that.  Once I had dyed some old white cotton sheet with brown, yellow and green Distress Ink, Stain and Re-inker, the overall look couldn't really be anything other than tattered.

I finished a trial piece, but it didn't feel like it was finished.  It needed something else.  So, using a borrowed machine I free machined around the edges of the piece and added the ruffle with some torn piece of dyed cotton.

For the next few pieces I backed the material with fairly heavy weight interfacing using bond-a-web. I find it makes it easier to do some free machine embroidery without the need for an embroidery hoop, which I don't like using with the machine if I can help it.  Using the machine stitching, I added some embellishments made with rags (also dyed with Distress Ink and stains) along with some buttons.  Again, some random free machining and zigzag stitches around the edges of the ATCs finished them off.

I was really pleased with how they ended up and even though tattered, I thought they turned out with a real 'spring' feel.  This set were very hard to post off for the swap, I was so happy with the final result, so I decided I would make more, maybe in slightly different colour ways as toppers for cards, and some different sizes, maybe a piece of larger art work.

So far, the different colour ways has not happened - I love these colours!

I made an A5 size card birthday card along similar lines and mounted the fabric stitched element (slightly larger than an ATC) on a background made from the grasses stamped directly onto the card.

Finished Birthday Card

Close up of Machine Stitching and French Knots

Another card was made for a 90th birthday, adding some stamped butterflies and mounting the topper on some gold mirror card.  A cutomised brad with '90' holds on a tattered hand dyed rosette to finish it off.

 

 

With a request to enter a piece of work into an exhibition, I was struggling to come up ideas, then thought as I had enjoyed making these pieces with stamping and stitching I could come up with something larger with the same kind of look. 

On this occasion I started with a frame and pre-cut mount and worked out how big the piece was going to be from there, in this case just smaller than A4.  With some stamps from a variety of different companies (Claritystamp, Hero Arts, Martha Stewart, Inkylicious) of grasses and plants I stamped a test piece on paper to see how the stamps would work together.

After cutting a piece of cotton to the required size and staining it with a variety of Distress inks and stains I again stabilised the material with some heavy(ish) weight interfacing and bond-a-web.  I rubberstamped a selection of images, some multiple times, some overlaying other images with a sepia shade of archival ink and heat set it. 

From there I added more grasses by way of free machine embroidery and highlighted some of the stamped images with stitch, but leaving some of the stamped images without any embellishment. This seems to make them appear in the background and I really like the way it looks.  Hand embroidered long stitch, French knots and straight stitch flowers were added in a range of green, gold and brown shades to finsih off the piece. 

Framed piece

I have made a couple of these pieces now along the same lines with similar colourways, each time experimenting slightly with the free machine element.

ATCs are a fantastic challenge, and one theme can keep on inspiring you months afterwards.

Pink Birthday

A birthday for a lover of pink, I had just the Gelli print.  A pink dotty print, it just needed to be pinker!

The print, using a stencil of small circles and pink acrylic on white coated card was coloured when dry, with bright pink Distress ink using a foam applicator.  Excess ink was removed by buffing with kitchen paper.

Using the stencil on two corners of the print, embossing ink was pushed through with cotton wool.  Heat and stick powder from Stampin' Up! was sprinkled, over the top, the excess removed and the powder heated until tacky.  Bright pink fine glitter was sprinkled over and the excess tipped away. 

Once dry this decorated print was matted onto pink paper and stuck to a scored card of the correct size with double sided tape.

The third way the stencil was used on this project was to ink through with pink Distress ink around the stamped 'Happy Birthday' greeting on cream card.  Once dry this piece was matted onto pink paper and mounted onto the card with foam pads.

I have a big box of paper flowers already made, none in pink though, so these in green, yellow and purple were given the pink Distress ink treatment and added to the card as an embellishment with gel glue.

Bonfire Night ATCs

These cards were made for last year's Bonfire Night/Halloween ATC swap, but they never made it to the blog.

The firework photos, were taken by a friend and are the star of the show!  These photos make up the backgrounds of the cards and each one is different.

The Houses of Parliament image is a rubberstamp from an Artemio set of clear stamps called London Landmarks.  Stamped onto copier paper with permanent ink, the image was coloured with grey watercolour, allowed to dry then cut out with a craft knife.  An image of Parliament was produced for each ATC and they were stuck to the firework backgrounds with PVA glue and weighted under some books between waxed paper, until dry.



Copies of the old poem "Remember, Remember, the fifth of November.  Gunpowder treason and plot......" were typed out and printed onto light card, ripped around the edges, scrunched and aged with Distress Ink in a brown colour. These were mounted with some dimension on each of the cards allowing the fireworks to be seen clearly.