Birthday pressies and Etsy shop!

Thought I'd pop up a couple of pictures of some of my latest creations, some personalised stamps for my friend's kids for their recent birthdays... they went down rather well! I hadn't really thought of selling personalised ones before but the text wasn't actually too fiddly to do, so it might be an option.

This was a toadstool for the fairy mad Isobel...

and a super hero for 'Spidey' fan Ben!

I was especially pleased how Ben's came out and I've been constantly pestered since by my two to make them the same.

I've set up my Etsy shop finally (http://www.skullandcrossbuns.etsy.com/) and I'm just getting my first selection of stamps ready to sell and getting stupidly excited at the prospect!! Please have a nosey and let me know what you think so far :) You can always 'favourite' me in advance if you like ;-) Please check back early October, I'll be running a couple of special offers for the grand opening.

Right off to do yet more carving, hope you all had a great weekend...

Blows dust off blog...

Well it's been rather a long time since I last updated this so here goes!

After being made redundant in late March I pretty much went straight to work for another local mail order company, I love my new job!

Anyway, back to the stamps! Over the summer after experimentation and spending rather a lot of £, I was really struggling to get good results out of the polymer clear stamping kit. This was really frustrating as I had loads of great designs with now not much to do with them. I spent a bit of time searching the web for some inspiration and found a fantastic selection of pictures of hand carved rubber stamps on flickr and had a bit of an 'Eureka!' moment!!

Now the only real experience I had of hand carving before was doing Lino printing in secondary school using incredibly blunt and virtually prehistoric carving tools (our Art department was massively underfunded...) I sourced some cheap erasers and a basic carving kit and got some fairly good results and it was really nice to feel that I was getting back on track..

Fast forward to today and I'm almost ready to start selling! I've got some wooden blocks, some slightly better tools than the school ones (I bet they are still being used there now and still haven't been sharpened ;-) ), found which carving medium suits me best and lots of great designs under my belt. I'm faffing around on Gimp tonight to create my Etsy banner, so watch this space!

This picture is of some of my works in progress, let me know what you think!