Stampy

Challenge, Day 16: Make a unique print by cutting up a potato or sponge, and use it to stamp on a material of your choice.

All outta potatoes, on to the sponge!  I don't know about you, readers, but I'm not made of money.  I decided to cut a small chunk of sponge off a bigger piece so I could still use the bigger part for cleaning.  As a result, I only had a small piece of sponge to work with.  I know that I don't work well as a subtractive artist, so I decided to just create a piece using my small chunk of sponge as it was cut instead of trying to cut it down into a smaller and more interesting shape, or variety of shapes.  I loosely mixed some red, purple, and green paint together in a tray, dipped my sponge in, and lightly covered a piece of paper with back-to-back stampings, not random stamp marks like I did before in my apple painting.  Here is the result:

I love pattern and texture, especially when there's something a little "wrong" with it - the print doesn't line up, the saturation varies, etc.  That organic, imperfect quality is attractive to me.  However, I think it's important that craftsmanship is considered.  I can't stand seeing horribly cut mattes on framed pictures!

Here's a close-up of part of the picture I made:

Feeling much more energized today, and loving these longer days with more sunlight exposure.  

Day 5

Challenge:  What do you collect?  Work with a collection of objects you have in your home (or borrow a friend's if you like).

For this challenge, I had to think for a moment: do I have any collections?  I collected key chains as a kid, but those days are long gone.  Whenever I travel, I like to buy a piece of unique jewelry as a souvenir, but I've never been terribly inspired to make work related to fashion or glamour, it's just not my thing.  So I started looking around the apartment, looking through things and discovering that I do have a collection, but I just didn't know it:

SCRAPS.

I have little pieces of paper, snippets of inspiration, a box of buttons, bags of pieces of embroidery floss, leftover batting, funny cut-out bits of felt, scant feet of yarn skeins wound into small balls, dollops of paint left in the bottoms of paint containers, and so on.  For this challenge, I decided to get out some of the scrap felt pieces, embroidery floss. and batting to make a stuffed patchwork heart.  I've made stuffed snowmen ornaments and small felt bird toys as gifts or for craft fairs before, so the concept was familiar to me.

First, I dragged some cardboard out of my recycling bin and cut out a heart template.  Still, I didn't follow the template exactly.  That adds character, right?  I actually love a little imperfection in most things:

My plan was to create another patchy heart for the back, but I decided on a solid color backing instead.  After attaching the back and stuffing the heart with batting, it became an adorable tiny pillow and/or toy:

I'm not sure, but I think that Lola approves:

Now, what to do with this crafty creation?  Mother's day gift that rivals something I probably made for my mom about 15 years ago?  Stuff a little catnip in there and let the kitties have at it?  Give to a nephew of mine who would probably either throw it, squeeze it until the seams break, or try to eat it?  Tell boyfriend that I made it just for him???  Oh, the choices.

In any case, my sister/roommate does have one collection - shot glasses.  Here's one that I bought for her from a trip last month to Arizona:

I considered using her collection for this challenge, but the scraps idea took a hold of me before any creative shot glass idea came to me.