2020 for many was a challenging year. There were some benefits, like being less busy and having more time at home. In September I had a desire to bring people together before flu season began and so with a friend, started making plans to have a ladies night of making Christmas cards.
As I looked at ideas I came across crafts using rubber stamps. The nice stamps are quite pricey and being a graphic designer, I thought, why not design my own. I remembered carving lino boards and creating prints in high school art class. So I bought some carving tools, rollers, inks, stamp pads, and found some soft boards to carve!
It was actually a lot of fun doing the carving. I discovered the Distress brand of inks and enjoyed using embossing powder and the heat gun to create glossy and sparkle finishes. Here are some of the Christmas cards I created. Since my day job (melanie graphics) had a slower schedule due to the pandemic, it gave me the time to make many cards to send to family and friends (something I rarely do).
Click on images to enlarge.
Creating the rubber stamps was so much fun that I spent many LATE NIGHTS carving gifts for my neices and nephews. If you buy a large enough carving block, you could probably use it to stamp fabric too, like a tshirt… something I’d like to try sometime. I had hoped to be able to carve typographical stamps for the cards but found it hard to get that to look smooth (the Peace JOY Hope LOVE is the only one I carved by hand). I did carve the kids names but they were larger fonts so that was easier. I designed on computer and just printed things out to trace onto the carving blocks with pencil.
For the girls I carved hearts, flowers, rainbows, unicorn, bunny, the Little Mermaid… and for the boys dinosaurs, monsters, video game symbols, egyptian symbols, comic strip graphics and tic tac toe.
I believe the kids had fun with their gifts!
