Persistence

I'm a persistent kind of person. I will work and work and work at something until it's what I want it to be or I'm so frustrated I want to chuck it through the window. Sometimes both. But when someone ELSE is pushing and poking at me? I dig my heels in. That's just how I am. This is a Kellyism, because she's the same way!

Remember Angry Caterpillar? He's resisting the urge to become a butterfly! 

Our Middle

Suzi gave me a couple of books yesterday for inspiration and one of them is a book that the lady has all these questions that are supposed to make you "think" about stuff. For me, thinking is a simple process. I would MUCH RATHER think about something that has an answer. A problem with a solution - I might not know what the solution IS, but it's there and I can find it.

One of the questions reads: What is in between our inside and our outside? The answer comes to me instantly: our middle. Done. Now, if this person was before me, asking me this question, here is where she would start backpedaling. "No, ok, but - " or "All right, but - " or "That's not really what I meant" or on and on and on. People make up these things and inside their own head they sound so complicated. Then they put them out there in the world and they're like "Look how complicated I am. Look at the type of stuff I think up. Aren't I inspiring?"

And my own friends agree and think these people are inspiring. And they expect me to find this inspirational and "get me thinking" about what is between my inside and my outside. Well, I know the answer. My middle.

But I have something for you all to debate amongst yourselves. In New York, that little ball of fried dough that comes out of the middle of the donut, we call a "munchkin". That's what they are a Dunkin' Donuts. For us, it's like when you call a copy a "xerox" or a tissue a "kleenex". Here and in Florida, they call it a donut hole. Now, before you go talking smack about New Yorkers, I want you to think about this: holes are not balls. You can have a ball-shaped hole. But a hole, by definition, is an empty space. A hollowed place in something solid. An empty pit. Look it up.

On that note, here is a stamp I carved for our Soul Garden chatters yesterday:

Hubby's Birthday!

We made him a card. Believe it or not, Liam did most of the work. He drew the cake and painted the whole front. (I outlined the cake in purple marker.) He even stamped most of the letters for "happy birthday". I added the little owl stamp because Tim totally has a thing for owls. He's obsessed with Hedwig.

He wrote this - see the serifs on the "Y"s?? It's because I showed him the Y stamp and it had serifs! 

I added this stamp to the back, it's a stamp I carved of Liam. I need to gouge out the face a little more, huh? 

Notecards

Today on Soul Garden chat, we talked about notecards and how we're using them in our planners. Here are some that I made today. I carved this little owl and the talk bubble stamps for this one:

Nothing but paid for stamps for this one!

I really like the gold and brown here:

And this is just a chunk of scrapbook paper with some embossed flowers:

Great, Goog, but what the heck is Soul Garden? Suzi's newest class, of course! It's fantastic so far :)

Hell is...

So, here is a girl...I might have posted her before. The shading is better in person, of course. 

And I really wanted to stamp "hell is other people" on her, my new favorite quote. I was using the alphabet stamps that I carved myself, and I thought were going to take up more space so I thought I'd put two words at the top and two at the bottom, but the first two didn't take up very much space. I was a little torn then, because leaving a HUGE space between the words - two all the way at the top and two way down at the bottom - seemed silly.

But I just went with it! I'm happy. She rocks my socks. 

An owl and a cloud

Sounds like a Dr. Seuss book! Nope, it's just some stamps I carved. The owl is Kelly's design, I just did the carving. The cloud, I just like the idea of the raindrops being inside it for some reason.

Here's the rubber:

Carved:

And here's how they stamp!

A Day of Crazy Stamp Carving

Owl:

Hippo:

Rhino:

Thought bubble:

Cupcake:

Talk bubble:

More to come!

Stamps!

I have a friend (OK, three friends) who are constantly encouraging me to teach classes. But here is my class teaching issue: I don't feel like I have anything to teach people. Other than drawing (which I learned from Suzi Blu), most of the stuff I do is just stuff I've figured out. Last night when I was carving stamps, I thought about this in depth. The process for stamp carving is so EASY. Buy rubber, buy carving tool, draw something on the rubber, use tool to carve. What is there to TEACH someone? Kelly is so funny when I'm carving she says I'm working my magic. But seriously it's EASY. Why would you need me to teach you something so easy??

This is the pencil I use - it's the same one I use for drawing, shading, math class. I LOVE this pencil. It fits perfectly in my hand. Unfortunately it costs more than I like to pay for pencils. $6 for two at Target.

This is the tool I use. It's a Speedball, but Blick also makes one and it costs about $3 less than this one.

This is the rubber I use. It's Blick's brand and it comes just like this - no wrapper, no tags, no price stickers.

Then I do one of two things. Either I draw or print out what I'm going to carve on a piece of plain old printer paper, then trace it with a pencil and burnish it onto the rubber - usually with my phone - OR I draw right onto the rubber with a ball point pen. Perfection is NOT something I strive for. Ever. This one is for Kelly :)

I didn't stamp with Kelly's stamp because that seemed wrong, but here's a finished and stamped one!

Is that teaching? What questions could there possibly be? Draw, carve, stamp. 

Angry-Pillar ATCs

All finished and ready to be mailed! 

Yesterday someone asked me "Why is he angry?" and I felt silly because I thought it was sort of obvious and I was clearly wrong. We're doing a caterpillar swap because in the Fairies class, we're talking about cocooning and transforming. Right now we're caterpillars, crawling along and munching on leaves. We don't see anything wrong with the caterpillar life. But if we want to become butterflies, we have to let go of EVERYTHING we know. Everything. We won't walk any more, we'll fly. We'll eat different foods in a completely new way. Sure, sure, sure, there are exciting things, too. But in order to have the exciting things, we have to go through the scary and unusual things. ALL caterpillars turn into butterflies. They don't have the "comfort zone" problem that humans do. They're not afraid. But this guy? He's resisting change with all his might! He's angry because he doesn't WANT to change. He doesn't NEED to change. He's living his life just fine, thank you very much, and he doesn't want to hear about wonderful new adventures. He just wants to live his little caterpillar life exactly the way he is. Of course, it's a ridiculous concept because caterpillars don't think. They don't resist change. But what if they did? What if they were too scared to change?

Angry-pillar

For him, I tried a trick my friend TJ told me that made a ton of sense at the time. She said to carve out the MIDDLE of the little places (like his eyes, teeth, and spots) first, before carving away the edges, so I tried it. 

And he came out pretty cute. But see the spots in his eyes and how uneven his teeth are? TJ's trick didn't work for me at all. The only reason I can think of is because this is a super soft medium and she carves linoleum blocks and she really likes the much harder Speedball rubber. I much prefer this substrate to the pink stuff from speedball, and next time I'll do it my old way - outline everything and then gouge out the little parts. Even though it's probably the "wrong" way, and I could get better at this way if I practiced, sometimes there's no reason to change what we're good at!

Stamp Face

Draw:

Transfer:

Carve:

 Ink:

Stamp!

My ink pad isn't juicy enough, but you get the idea! I LOVE carving stamps!!

A Carving Date

What are we carving? What else: zombie bunnies!

Zombie bunnies!

And their human zombie, pretending to be a bunny! Look out world, the zombie bunnies are going out in an ATC swap for Easter.

Alphabet Stamps

Doodled and carved by my very own hand, what could be more fun than that?? They're one inch by one inch, and the tall ones (t, h, etc) are one by one and a half. I love them. I really, really love them!

I stamped a few during the process, just to make sure I was happy with them (I was!):

And here they are all done and happy.

So, hubby wanted to know if carving letters backward was "easier" for me because of my dylexia. Just in case you're wondering the answer is NO. It was not easy for me at all, and stamping letters is always a challenge for me - you can cell when I was test stamping that I thought the "n" stamp was "u" - even though I wrote "n" on the back of it (of course, upside down they look the same...). I get really confused with b,d,p,q,s,z, and j. Not g - I'm totally fine with g, but j really gets to me. Finally I sat right next to the computer so I could see which direction the letters pointed, typing them to get the lowercase ones when I needed to. Good times.

Swirly Tree

I tried to make it a stencil, but I ended up with a mask, and then I liked it too much and glued it into my journal. So, here's the perfect solution: I made it into a stamp!

Drew right on the rubber with a number 2 pencil:

It's not Speedball rubber, it's from Blick's and it doesn't have a brand. It wasn't even packaged, just sold exactly like this.

Then I carved with my #1 tip:

And finished up with the #4:

Then I stamped it in my journal with StazOn so it won't smear when I paint over it:

I don't know why, but I find stamp carving freakishly fun. 

Holy crap this is FUN!!

OK, so the stamp carving was fun and I really wanted to carve more, but I just wasn't sure what to carve...what to carve...what to carve...I toyed with the idea of using a picture, but HOW? Like THIS!!

Start with a picture of Mini Me saying "I quit!" (He's totally posing, not cranky!)

Pen tool...

 Carve!!

 STAMP!

SO FREAKING FUN!!! I know I just posted about this, but I couldn't help it - this is SO MUCH FUN!