Category: Crafts

Coffee Filters as handmade fabric shows a kimona made from coffee filters. Every morning, as I throw out yesterday morning’s filter, I think I ought to be doing somtething with it.

For some time now, I have been meaning to take a look at the website for our local stamp store, Simple Pleasures. Oddly enough, it was hard to find it using Google, so I hope this link will help.

Cheryl Rae describes an interesting design process tool called Polar Adjectives at Sundancers, Wild Women and DreamWeavers.

Some friends of mine from Denver had been trying to get me to go to the Denver Art Trading Card exchange for a while. It is held in LoDo (Lower Downtown Denver) on the second Saturday of the month. Last month I had family stuff planned and there was a snowstorm as well. This month, I was able to go, but didn’t have much time to work on cards. However, I did dig out some untraded ones from online exchanges, and made some new ones from old carvings. I was able to come up with 21 cards and traded every one. They all used handcarved images, usually with a commercial background stamp.

I saw one other person there with ATC’s using possibly handcarved images. There was a lot a variety: good prints from color printers, good color copies, cards with embellioshments, cards with commercial stamps, cards with embellishments, and collage cards. Most people had several different designs, so you could nearly always find something you liked to trade.

I plan to do this again, and will try to take double the number of cards, since I had to say “sorry, all traded out” more time than I can count.

On one of the discussion lists to which I belong, several people were discussing Art Trading Cards, an art form in which I have dabbled using my carved images. This one, of the hawk, is probably my favorite. I’ve put up a large image of of the others that I have done.

Modern Illuminator Rubber Stamps is an “angel” company which has unmounted images with a medieval and renaissance theme.

In a comment, “Fran”:http://redondowriter.typepad.com/sacredordinary/ asked if the Basset Hound was a rubber stamp. I checked, and this rubber stamp is from “Mostly Animals”:http://www.mostlyanimals.com/kristalhtml/rack07/k0567.htm. While checking this site, I was surprised to learn that “Mostly Animals”:http://www.mostlyanimals.com/ is an “angel” company, which means they allow the sale of items using their handstamped images.

My friend Becky sent me this card, since I was with her when she bought the image of the Basset Hound. Inside, the card says “Another Year, Another Wrinkle.”

Hampton Art Stamps has a well-designed web-site which includes a Project of the Month. This month, the project is a Valentine’s Day book.

I am continually trying to come up with the ideal Travel Kit to take with me when I got to Inkslingers, our monthly rubber stamp club. I have so much stamping stuff it is not difficult to leave some of it packed all the time.