Faux Bois Valentines-A DIY Rubber Stamp Carving Tutorial

I thought it was about time that I posted a rubber stamp tutorial. This design might look like a tricky stamp to carve, but it's actually super easy. The beautiful thing about wood grain, is that there are no "rules"- So if you go off track, no one will ever know!

Aside from some blank rubber block (which I've just realized that

I've forgotten in my list-durrr), you'll need a few tools.

1. Ink pad. (any ink pad will do!)

2.Scissors. This is just for cutting your heart out in the end. (ok, I just re-read that. Not YOUR heart. You will cut out a PAPER heart.) I'll bet you never thought valenetines could be so violent;)

3.A bone folder. If you don't have one, the back of a spoon or the

handle of a butter knife will do.

4. A 4b (or softer) pencil. I didn't use a 4b, I used a 2b, and see

how light my lines are? They should be darker! Seeing as I've done this a few times, I didn't bother using my 4b.(My 4B may or may not have been holding up my hair at the time...)

5. Xacto knife, or utility knife. Xacto does have a lot more precision though, so anything long that comes to a fine tip will be okay.

6. A small V tip Carver-I use a speedball size 1. You can use larger, but keep in mind, the smaller the tip, the smaller the lines will be.

7. Clip Art. (which will be at the bottom of this post.)

8.Chip board or card stock-your call! (or any other surface you feel

like printing;)

Step 1. Print off clip art to your preferred size. Mine is

about 2.5"x3" .

Go over the lines with your freshly sharpened 4b pencil.

2. Once all the lines are covered in pencil, turn the artwork

over, face down onto your carving block. You can position it however

you like, just make sure that the artwork isn't hanging over the edge.

Gently rub the back of your artwork with the edge of the bone folder, until you've rubbed the entire heart onto the block. (This will feel a lot like putting on a temporary tattoo;)

You can lift the edges slightly now and then to see if it's transferred completely. If it has, remove the paper. If it hasn't, continue to rub the back until it's completely transferred. Be careful to hold it down with one hand while transferring, as it can slide around and cause double lines.

3. Now that your design is transferred, use your xacto and cut your design from your carving block. Not exactly on the outside line, just roughly, to remove it from the rest of your block.

4. Now that the heart is separated from the rest of the block and easier to handle, you can carefully cut around the shape of the heart. If you really want to, you could do this at the very end-I always do it before hand though, because I find it easier to maneuver while carving this way.

5. This is the fun part! Now you get to take your carver and carefully cut each pencilled line. Gently push the blade away from you, keeping the tip of the blade almost parallel with the surface of the carving block. Keep in mind, the deeper you cut, the wider your lines will be.

If you wanted to, you could make a reverse image, and remove all the empty space for a completely different look. (That would be a bit trickier.) But If you're up for a challenge, have at it!

6. This step is optional. I chose to remove the middle square from my heart, and leave the space empty. If you don't want to do this, that's a-ok. It will just mean that in the end, this part will be inked, rather than blank.

You could use a larger tip for this too, and cut deeper, if you want fewer lines to show up in the end. I rather like the added texture though, it adds an extra "hand carved" feel to the print in the end, so I continued to use my small tip for this.

7. Now you get to use your stamp! I find that with stamps this large, it's easier to do things a little backwards.

Rather than pressing the stamp onto the pad, press the stamp pad on to the stamp. This way you can see if it's thoroughly inked, if the ink is even, and you don't get near as much ink on your fingers;)

8. Stamp your hearts out onto your card stock. As you stamp, be sure to press all over the back of your stamp, to get a completely transferred image.

That's one of the beauties of hand carved stamps; you can selectively press different areas of the stamp at a time.

If you didn't want the middle hollowed out square to show up at all, you wouldn't have to press there.

Last but not least, cut your hearts out and voila! I punched a hole in mine and strung some sweet bakers twine through them and used them as tags. You could play cupid though, if you wanted to, and hand them out to your truly best-est buddies.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me through my stamp shop, where I'll soon be carrying stamp carving supplies!

Enjoy!

xo

Pretty Maids All in a Row... a Flower Tutorial

We used these watercolor flowers for our wedding, just to have some extras to decorate our tables and the window sills in the old barn where we held our reception.

Not only are they super easy, they're also really cheap to make! We only had to buy real flowers for bouquets. ( but you could use these for bouquets, really, if you wanted to!)

In bunches, they look like they were taken right out of one of Monet's paintings!

Grab your bridesmaids, and have a flower making party!

Materials:

Circular Coffee filters (3-6 per flower, the more filters, the fuller the flower)

Scissors

Staples/Stapler

Florist Tape

Florist Wire/Stems

Tubed watercolor paints or Food coloring

Spray Bottle

Clothes Line and Clothes Pins

Fold the filters in half and flatten out the "waves".

Cut Petals out of the wavy part, down to the flat bottom. You can cut a little deeper down if you like

but just be sure that you leave some form of a base.

If you cut the petals sort of long and skinny with pointy ends, they end up looking more like peonies.

If you cut them more curvy with a slight point, they end up looking more like a tea-cup rose!

Play around with it, there really isn't a right or wrong way. It just depends on the look you are going for.

You can cut a stack of 3 at a time no problem. I've done 6 which was a little tricky, but doable.

Separate the layers, and pull the centres down into a point, and gently fold the petals up.

 You can use the end of a pencil or a chopstick to do this if you want but it's really pretty simple. You don't need it to be a perfect uniform shape.

Take the first bunched up layer, and place it into the centre of the second layer. Again, fold up the petals of the second layer. Make sure that you're pinching both layers from the bottom.

Repeat, until you have as many layers as you like and the flowers are as full as you want them to be.

I sort of take the layers apart several times, turn them around etc to get the shape I want. (If I have time to be choosy!)

This step is one that I added after making a lot of these flowers and having a hard time relying florist's tape alone to hold them together. After adding the staple, they hold together so much better, both while coloring them and while using them to decorate.

Holding the bottom of the flower and pinching all layers, staple the layers together. Make sure the staple is vertical, in the direction that a natural stem would be. If it's horizontal you'll run into some problems later when we go to put them on the stems. Also be sure that you get the staple through each layer.

You can either color your flowers now (before putting the stems on) or after. I've done it both ways, and both ways work. If you want to color them first, the directions are below.

To add the stems, take the bottom of the flower and line up the staple with the stem. You'll want about an inch of stem in the flower itself.

Pinch the base of the flower around the stem. You will need to *ever-so-slightly* fold the entire flower around the wire as you do this. Once it's taped it will fall back to it's original shape.

Tape the flower by folding it around so that it just overlaps itself. Go around several times before moving down the stem. Make sure to go down the stem about an inch to be sure it's secure.

To colour your flowers, you'll need the spray bottle, and liquid watercolour paints.

This is doable with food coloring, although the color isn't quite as rich, unless you're

doing a darker color like red.

For the pink ones, I used a mixture of permanent rose and cadmium Red. For the yellow flowers I used yellow ochre and cadmium yellow, with a touch of burnt umber.

If you want, play around with colors first on paper (scraps of the coffee filters would work!) and see what you get.

Once you get your colors mixed the way you like them, add them to the bottom of your spray bottle, and dilute them with water. (You'll need about 1 cup of water for 60 flowers...so easy does it. No need to go overboard.)

Test your spray paint on some scraps and see if you need to add more paint to the water. If you like, add a touch of scent or essential oil to the paint if you want scented flowers.

Put on an old t-shirt for this part. You're bound to get a little bit of paint on yourself with this part.

Take your flowers and your spray paint outside. (make sure it's not going to rain, as you'll need some time for these to dry. They dry really quickly in the sun.)

Hold your flower an arms length away and spray the flower from the centre, working your way out. Some of the paint will cause the petals to stick together a bit. Just separate them with your fingers and be sure to get the paint right down to the centre of the flower.

If you've already put on the stems, just fold the stems over the clothesline and let them hang upside down.

If you haven't put the stems on, Just pin them by the base (on the staple) so that they're facing down.

The reason you want them facing down, is because the paint will run to the edges of the paper, making them look all that more real once they're dried. It's really noticeable in the darker colors like pink and red. (see the pink flower below?)

They only take about an hour to dry on a sunny day. Make sure they're completely dry before putting the stems on, if you haven't already.

Voila! Pretty, Affordable, and they never wilt! Either save them for later use, or send them home with you guests:)

New Beginnings

I'm back, and now a Mrs!

I'm SO sorry that I dropped off of the face of the planet over the last month! Who knew wedding planning could be so time consuming?! Combine that with work, kids, my youngest sister getting married in June, we were busy people.

So far, I only have a few pictures from the wedding. Once I have more, I'll post them, along with some really fun DIY projects that we did to make our wedding fun!

Our cake was made by one of my bestest friends,  the wonderful and talented Jocelyn of Sugarbelle

Reuben and Zeke painted a nasty old tacky gold picture frame for us. I bought it at a church garage sale for a buck, with the intention of giving it a face lift.

 I was so impressed with how neatly they painted it too. Not bad for a 6 and 7 year old!

We used this for our seating chart. Notice that there aren't any numbers? We did

 antique/vintage modes of transportation instead.

More to come soon, thanks to our three fantastic Photographers,

R. Irvine, Karen Schliewinsky and Simone Upham.