Challenge #252 and Latest Hand-Carved Stamps

Challenge #252 - Tangle Within a Tangle

This week's challenge (here) was to create your string from a tangle, and then tangle inside it :)  How fun is that?!!

I decided I definitely was not going to look at what others did before creating my tile; I was afraid everyone was going to pick my tangle :).  I started out by going through my catalog of tangles - nothing but a bunch of step-outs in a ring binder and a bunch of 2x2 inch samples of tangles.  

I put some possibilities aside, and then went with the one I thought would be most fun.  I hope I don't go through everyone's entries and find out everyone chose Poke Root!!

Latest Hand-Carved Stamps

Here are the last hand-carved stamps from the #CarveDecember challenge.  I really appreciate everyone's nice comments about my stamps :)  

I'm going to grab a couple of these patterns and get a stencil cut from it.  I'm trying a seller on ETSY and see how it turns out.  If you know of any places that cut stencils from your art for a reasonable price, please let me know.

Arches that can be turned into windows :)

This is a fun stamp but hard to make a pattern with;
this is the best I could do :)

This was quite a fun one to carve and the print really fun to embellish.

Another fun one to play with;
I love the border pattern in the middle.

I love how this one turned out.  I feel it is not my usual style, but sometimes it is good to get out of your comfort zone :)

Challenge #250 and New Hand carved Stamps

Challenge #250

The Diva's weekly challenge (here) was to go back to basics: 3.5 x 3.5 white tile, black and white, string, and pencil shading.  It is probably not that different than I usually do, but I did try to use some tangles I had not used in a while.

New Hand Carved Stamps

In December I carved a bunch of stamps to play along with Julie Fei Fan Balzer and a bunch of other people for the #CarveDecember challenge (here).  I did not carve one stamp a day (just did not have the time), but did carve as many as I had time for.  It even made me get on Instragram to share, encourage, and get encouragement :).  I had a lot of fun.

Here are all of them (bottom) and the prints on fabric above.  I will show a few at a time in the next few posts.

This is a very simple flower, sketched on paper in about 10 seconds.  It took a bit longer to carve :)

This one I carved on my wedding anniversary, so I had to go with the LOVE theme :)

This is a very simple branch, which you can print several ways to make crazy looking trees :)

Hand carved stamp - #CARVEDECEMBER

I wanted to carve another snowflake stamp (I carved 2 a few years ago).  I started out folding a piece of paper, cutting it and then unfolding it.  Then used a similar design for my stamp.

For some reason the paper looked cool, but when I first printed my stamp it looked really ugly and not like a snowflake at all!  I was really disappointed!

When I was about to forget all about the stamp, I thought it might look cool if I printed over it, but with it rotated 60 degrees.  Aha!!!  Now I actually like it!!  At it will always look different, that's for sure!

Top:  Left - stamp; Middle - 1 print (ugly); 2 prints (better!)
Bottom: prints of different colors with black outline