Altered Stamp Blocks !

Good Morning.

I'm in a really chipper mood because I FINALLY finished 19 projects for 33 Dare to Get Dirty Challenges over at SCS!  This was a huge accomplishment for me because I'm so slow.  But I learned how to pick up speed and throw things pretty quick thanks to these challenges.

One of the challenges was to re-purpose.  So I did something I've done before and didn't have to put alot of thought into.  I remove all my stamps from wooden blocks, put them on cling mount, and store them by catagory in notebooks.  I have saved ALOT of the larger blocks to turn into mini pieces of art that I can sit around the house.  The original idea was to do a set for each holiday.  I'm still working on that, teehee. 

I started by selecting blocks that were different sizes and tried to figure out which 3 complimented each other.  I think these 3 worked out great.  Then I went through all my chipboard letters.  I knew I wanted each font to be different as well as a different size, so it was a matter of playing around with them to I got the combo I liked.  I have TONS of these all filed by letter, so it's not to difficult of a process.  Next I spray painted the backs and sides with black paint. 

I picked out some 7 Gypsies paper (their paper makes everything look good, right!) and trimmed it down for each block for a background.  I stamped alot of the images from this set and originally started out trying to color them with my copics, but it just wasn't working with the muted colors of this paper.  So I went with paper piecing using papers from the same paper pad.  I covered my chipboard letters with papers from the pad as well.  Just a reminder ...  the way you get the edges so smooth when altering the letters is to use Basic Grey file set along the edges.  The set comes with different shaped files for getting in small area's, holes, etc.

Once I planned out each of the layouts with the letters and paper pieced images.  I realized that I needed some more in the background.  So stamped some of the images from this set and  from the Flourishes set in the background and around the edges and that kinda brought it together.  I never know what I'm gonna end up with.  I just had a general idea of a look I wanted and started playing.

I hope this inspires you to do some playing of your own today!  Creating ART makes me so happy!

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by!

You can view all of my Altered Projects HERE