Stamping with Rayna

I joined a workshop in one of my yahoo groups (A.R.T.) based on Rayna Gillman’s book, Create Your Own Hand-Printed Cloth.

For the first lesson, we’re stamping with household items. I didn’t branch out as much as I could have—I wanted to cut up a pool noodle and stamp with that, look for some interesting textured items around the house to stamp with, and find or make some stencils, but I just haven’t had the energy. I have quite a few hand-carved and hand-made stamps, so most of these pieces were stamped with those.

This piece was stamped with opaque fabric paint and pieces of Styrofoam plates that I cut up and drew into with a stylus:

This is a piece of painted fabric, stamped with a leaf pattern carved into a rubber eraser:

Here’s a piece of painted fabric stamped with a kid’s foam beads glued to a wood base:

This one is painted fabric, stamped with strips of plumber’s gasket glued to a wood base (ok, I’ll admit I cheated with this one; I actually created it a while back, but I think it’s a good example of interesting effects with very simple stamps):

Here’s a technique I learned in Lyric Kinard’s Playing with Paint class at QU; the “stamp” is a pear, cut in half and dried on paper towels, then coated with fabric paint:

And finally, this fabric-painted piece was stamped with a store-bought swirl stamp, then stamped with that rubbery grid-like shelf liner material. I added some hand-painted accents both over and around the stamping. I really like this piece:

Now, as always, I need to figure out what to do with these pieces of fabric, other than just folding them up and stuffing them into a drawer. I’m thinking I should start working with a pre-defined color scheme for projects like this, so at least everything coordinates and can be used together in a larger piece.