I haven’t posted here in a long time, but this is my art diary, so this is my best option for this post.
Sometimes, okay a LOT of the time, I buy little things impulsively. I’m a sucker for old tools, especially drafting, drawing and sliderule type things. Jenny Kompolt and The Junk Girls are my all-time favorite “go to” for this stuff. Jenny saves stuff out for me, knowing that I love things like calf-weaners and bullet pencils.
I also love boxes (wooden, or nicely made cardboard ones) and stamps. I love stamps, and I use them in my art. Rubber mounted stamps, those new-fangled clear stamps you have to put on an acrylic block to use, and metal stamps.
I justify buying the metal ones, which are very heavy and usually quite expensive, saying I can use them in my art, but the truth is that they are for letter press type work and they don’t usually work very well for hand stamping.
Still, over the years, I have collected an odd assortment of metal stamps. My favorite, besides the “5” which is my favorite number, is the one that simply says “bacon” with a small farmhouse down in the corner.
Last night, I was stumbling around on the internet – using StumbleUpon, one of my favorite apps (Firefox Add-on) in the whole wide world. It searches for things I’m interested in – like art, fonts, food, graphics.
It works randomly to find sites that are interesting to me and non-commercial. I like it better than Google because it provides a seemingly infinite source of creative ideas, though one time I did get a message that said it had run out of sites for me. I must have been on a several-hour long Stumble bender that night.
Last night, it stumbled me to a site called “Instructables” and to a page on that site that showed how to use rubber stamps to emboss fabric.
I tried it this morning as per the instructions. First with one of those cheapy stamps that have to cling to a block. I was bummed when the heart melted itself into the fabric. By the way, the red fabric is the bottoms from some IKEA curtains I put in my guest room. I went back and looked at the instructions, and sure enough, they mentioned I might not want to use the cheapy-type stamps. I moved on to my rubber stamp colleciton. I cherish these, so I was worried I might ruin one. I tried a $1 flower stamp I got in the Michael’s bargain bin with perfect results!
So I hot-footed it back out to my stamp-stash to pick some images for the pillow I wanted to make. I bought this red/white picnic tablecloth at the thrift store last week. I loved the bright red and white, and the hearts were so cute. But…I knew I didn’t have a rubber heart stamp…so what to do.
While rummaging around, I saw my big, H*E*A*V*Y box of metal stamps and instantly realized I must have bought these for this future project. They are hearty and are built to stand up to the beating that commercial graphics printing dishes out. They are cute and I love the designs. Digging in, I found an X and an O, and thought these would be a nice motif for the front of the pillow with the red/white fabric on the reverse.
I’ll post some images of the finished pieces (love pillows, plus little graphics sachets) when I finish them.
I love finding an idea, then making it my own. Thank you Instructables, for germinating this idea for me.
