Fun with Foam and Fabric!

Last week I felt like I needed to beef up my stash of stamped fabrics. (Mostly, I was avoiding working on two pressing deadlines for which I had no inspiration. Sigh.)

I started by sketching some ideas for hand made stamps. You know I like the circles.

I used sticky-back fun foam, cut out shapes and stuck them to bits of Styrofoam cut from recycled meat trays. So easy!

"Circle Ring"

"Attic Window"

I stamped with acrylic paint tone-on-tone on very light tan fabric. I mixed in a bit of blue, brown and green.

I like to create fabrics that will act as dynamic backgrounds and won't distract from whatever I collage on top of them.

"Gala"

"Blossom"

Hmmmm. There are things I like about these two and things I don't like. I wish "Gala" didn't look so much like an apple core. (Maybe I should not have named it after my favorite apple.) But I love the white design on this light blue fabric. "Blossom" looked much better in my sketch (third one on the top row). I think more negative space would make that stamp better. The petals are too solid.

"Galaxy"

"Pickle"

I love "Galaxy" and I think I'll use it often. "Pickle" is pretty cute too, but I wish it didn't look so much like the cross-section of a piece of fruit.

So, I made six stamps total. I put one of each side of these squares of Styrofoam.

I stamped three fat quarters... and you can see I did some painting and mono-printing also. I can share those pictures with you later.

Remember how I said I was procrastinating... well, at least it was productive!