Stamps, envies and monoprinting!

Thought I'd update you on what's going on in Studio Ha Ha! :o)

I've been meaning to share this photo of my hand carved cork stamps for a while but kept forgetting! Carving an alphabet set from wine bottle corks has been on my to do list for ages, years in fact! LOL So, over the summer I finally got down to working on a set. I have to admit they were surprisingly easy to carve, I wrote the letter in Sharpie on the cork and then just used my ordinary craft knife to carve them. My only problem was not always remembering to write the letters backwards! Actually I rather fancy a set of backwards alphabet so may do that when I have enough corks for another set! ;oD



I'm currently working on a inspiration themed one page zine for a swap on The Zine Pool Yahoo group. These little dinner money envies will be stuck to one of the pages of the zine and will be filled with something, not sure what yet! :oD I had great fun making these yesterday. I used crayon over a plastic rubbing plate, added watercolour paint and zapped with the heat gun. I've eyeletted the flaps and they will all have fibre like the one on the left of the pic when I get around to adding it tomorrow.



Today I've spent the day at White House Arts in Cambridge, with my friends Becky and Skippy, on a Monoprinting and Collagraph Printmaking course. It was an excellent day and I learnt lots about techniques that I'd never tried. We made collagraph blocks from cardboard by cutting shapes and gluing to another piece and also from Environmount (shiny white surface on both sides and recycled newspaper) by "drawing" with a craft knife and then peeling the surface off to varying degrees. We made prints from our collagraph prints with and without ink and also tried out simple monoprinting with ink on perspex sheets, laying paper down and using pencil, fingers or whatever to draw on it and then peel off to see the print. All my prints and blocks are drying out but once they're dry I'll be able to share some pics on here. ;o)