Author Archives: ruthlane
Playing with Paint
I decided to make some snowflake stamps and stencils today. I wanted to finish up a page in my sketchbook that I had started that had a winter poem on it.
I transferred the designs on to paper backed sticky foam and started cutting. These were a bit intricate and took a while to cut out.
Here’s the five stamps I made. I used copyright free clip art I found online for the designs.
I had planned on using this design as a stamp but then I decided it would work much better as a stencil.
I traced it on to the stencil plastic.
And cut it out with my trusty X-acto knife.
I peeled the paper off the back of the stamps and put them down on clear plastic.
I liked how the paper looked all curled up after peeling it off the stamps.
I decided to paint some papers blue first and then I would work from there. I didn’t take a photo of the paper just blue but while the paint was still wet, I put the stamp down on to the wet paint. I didn’t add any extra paint, just the dry stamp. And the photo above shows what happened. The stamp caused the paint to darken where the stamp was placed.
And the stamps even showed through to the back side of the paper. I really like this effect and will definitely try this again with other stamps.
Here’s one of the pages after drying.
I then added some white paint and some light blue paint with the stamps and stencils.
It snowed most of the day here today so I’m sure that must have influenced how these pages turned out.
Here’s the page that I originally planned to work on. The poem is called Winter Grace by Patricia Fargnoli. You should be able to read it if you click on the photo to enlarge it.
And I finished up a few of the pages that I had started before. I added a quote to the iris page.
Added some leaves to my roses.
And colored in my ghost flowers. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and a Merry Christmas. Thanks for stopping by and I appreciate all your comments and support.
Ukrainian Eggs – Pysanky
Ukrainian eggs are usually associated with Easter, but my local surface design group met today and we decorated some eggs for Christmas ornaments. We had a lot of fun and even though we were not very experienced the results weren’t bad. I don’t have much time this afternoon for a post since I have Christmas Stroll at the store tonight so I’ll leave you with a slide show that has photos of our morning decorating eggs.
Two More Sketchbook Pages
I have been working in my sketchbook lately (see post on the Felting and Fiber Studio for more photos). These are two pages that I worked on yesterday.
I have showed you this page before, it has a background of gesso and green paint, then it was stamped with the leaf shapes. I drew the roses with a pencil, then redrew in black pen. I then used Tombow pens to color and shade the roses. I am planning on adding stems to the roses and leaves so that all the stamped leaves will be background. I will post another photo when it’s finished.
This one is a painted green background with the purple blue color mono printed off of the remaining color left when we were screen printing. I then drew the echinacea with pencil and redrew with black pen. The next step was to paint the flowers in white so that then I could add the color of the flowers without it being overwhelmed by the background. I actually kind of like it this way but I’ll still probably add the color. The only problem is that I used watercolor pencil for the white (the only paint I had at the time) so I will need to go over it either with gesso or white acrylic paint. Or I could just leave it and call it “Ghost Flowers”. What do you think?
Holiday Postcard Exchange
I got word from Angela that she received my holiday postcard. So I can show you what I made for her.
I started with a nuno felted paper laminated poinsettia. The fabric that I used was some type of really shiny organza. I didn’t test it in advance for nuno felting which was a mistake. It just didn’t work all that well. It did attach but the wool fibers just didn’t want to stay attached very well.
Stitching to the rescue! I stitched around the main items. You can’t see very well in the first photo but there were brown stems underneath the fabric. I stitched on both sides of the stems and then cut back the fabric. Then I decided to cut away a bit more of the fabric from the center of the poinsettias. I had started with a size that was much bigger than the postcard. So I cropped it down until I found a pleasing design.
I then added some gold beads to the centers of the poinsettias and attached it to a piece of heavy interfacing with white fabric on the back. Then I stitched around the edges three times. The thread kept breaking and it was driving me crazy but finally I switched to a metallic needle and it worked fine.
Here’s a little closer view. I am happy with the results although I got a bit discouraged in the middle of the process. But that’ usually how things go, isn’t it? Have a great weekend and thanks for stopping by.






















