Try It OutThursday ; stamps

It's been a while since I last did a Try It Out Thursday post, but, inspired by Traci Bunkers' 30 days of carving I decided to try out stamp carving.

Well, that's not completely true. I have done some stamp carving before, but I did those using a silly little knife that did not cut properly. I bought a woodcarving set and I can tell you, that makes all the difference!

I got some cheap, soft erasers that I knew would not be any problem carving.
First, I sketched out a design on a piece of paper, and then on the stamp. I put some markings on the pieces that needed to be carved out, because knowing me I would cut the wrong bit...

Then I started to cut:

and tried it out:



I carved three more stamps:







And these are all of them together:



It's such a fun little project that did not take up a lot of time but had maximum results as far as I'm concerned. I can't wait to do more, including different shaped stamps. I'll be keeping an eye out for stamps!

....ohhhdearrricanfeelanewaddictioncomingon.....

Try It Out Thursday

Remember the Kraft tape I was talking about? I took it a step futher and made my own decorative tape!

Two weeks ago, Leslie Herger was doing her weekly Ustream show on turning medical tapes into decorative tapes by adding some paint, and I decided that I could not wait until I could get my hands on Micropore, but use my Kraft tape.

Here's what I did:

I started off with putting the tape on a cover of a catalogue I wasn't going to buy anything from anyway.


Then I painted and painted and painted, using acrylics paint in colours I like. Some I kept in one colour, some painted in a few different colours.


I doodled on some of them, others I drew lines on so I could write on them later.


I then stuck them to grease proof paper. Because my Art Journal has handy pockets throughout the journal, they're right there when I want them. I keep the catalogue covers in there too in case I feel the urge to paint some more tape.

Here are a few Art Journal pages I've used the tapes on:






It's highly addictive and such an easy project you could do it with children too. And don't stop at using the tape for your Art Journal, you can use them for scrapbooking projects, labels, cards, and wrapping presents.. I'm sure you can think of many more uses for these tapes.

I know what I'll be asking Father Christmas for this year: more tape!

Try It Out Thursday

The other day I went to Hobbycraft, which has just opened in town. Ohmygoodness, what a shop! It has products for anything creative you can think of. Needlecraft, knitting and crocheting, jewellery making, card making, it has all the paints and paper you could possibly want, tons of stamps, pens, model making supplies, all kinds of quilting materials, kits to keep your kids busy during the half term break... I dragged Tye through all the aisles and had to stop myself from drooling. I could easily have spend a fortune in there!

An unexpected find was kraft tape. The nice brown coloured paper tape that is used to back paintings. I got the permanent kind.

Sooooo.. let's try it out, shall we?

I stuck it to a page in my journal and burnished it quite well. I tried peeling it off but it wasn't easy like with masking tape. I like! Let's add some paint.


I just started drawing and out came this face. I don't particularly like it, but I wasn't going for a pretty picture anyway but am just testing things out. So I added some verrry runny white paint, which made the tape bubble up to begin with. After leaving it to dry for a bit, those bubbles disappeared. And the tape was still stuck right to the paper. So far so good!

On the next page, I put at a fair amount of paint. I scraped it with an old gift card, but there were eight or ten layers. And then I spotted a face! I got my charcoal pencil and outlined the face, adding more charcoal on the paint and smoothing it out so the face would pop out more.

I did the same to the next page, adding more and more paint because I couldn't spot a face straight away.


Then I remembered I was actually testing out the tape. Duhh! So I stuck a strip of tape on it, and was happy to see it stuck to the paint quite nicely.
And because of the charcoal I put tons of hairspray on the pages so it would not smudge anymore.

I left it to dry and was glad to see the kraft tape is still where it should be, and even covered in hairspray you can still write on it.

Yayyy for kraft tape! What will you try out today?