My very first hand carved stamp.

When I was in the US this summer

I bought tools for stamp carving. They have been sitting on my desk, and I have found no inspiration to try carving. Yesterday changed that.

In the online class I'm doing we're experimenting with watercolors (twinks) and stamping. Best stamps to use are those with larger spaces on, not fine lines. The only stamps I have in my stash are fine lined, so I had to make one myself. I'm not much of a stamper but this experiment opened my eyes, and I think it's really fun trying. The ones below are made from fine line stamps. What I have been looking at as mess only, really is part of the beauty of it all. Look at the ones far right, outlined with shade behind. I think they're beautiful.

But, I wanted to try a stamp with larger spaces too, and made my own. I have a lot of beautiful flowered curtains, and found one I liked. It took awhile to draw the image, and I drew it in a much larger scale than the stamp shows. My copy mashine did the downsizing job for me. It's not an easy task to carve out such amount of curved lines on a small stamp, but I did it and I'm very pleased with the result. It was fun trying it, and finding it worked well. I'm sure I'm going to make more stamps, now I'm chasing the perfect images to carve.

I drew and painted the image as well, but I'll tell you more about that later on.