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Monday, September 14, 2009

Stamps from Fun Foam


My local art quilt group, the Pandoras, met today at my house to create rolling stamps. We followed directions in the current issue (September/October 2009) of Cloth Paper Scissors in an article by Linda Calverley. The idea is to make stamps on cylindrical objects so you can roll your design on, rather than stamping straight down.

We started by collecting cylinders, such as pieces of PVC piping, salt containers, cardboard tubes, tennis ball tubes and baby wipe containers. The author suggests using Fun Foam, which is a lightweight foam plastic material that comes in sheets of varying thicknesses, and is often pre-cut into cute shapes for kids’ crafts. She uses a very strong adhesive (such as UHU glue) to stick the foam onto the cylinders, but I found it at my local craft store with an adhesive backing paper already attached. All we had to do was to cut our designs, peel off the paper backing, stick them to the cylinders, then dab on the paint and let ’er roll!

Here’s a closeup of my corn design shown above with the stamp:


Instead of using fabric paints, I used a mixture of Liquitex Fabric Medium and Liquitex Professional Acrylic Inks. Although the inks are very thin, they have very strong color, making them ideal for stamping. I mixed just a few drops of the ink with the Fabric Medium so that it would not bleed or dry out as quickly, and to create more volume. The Fabric Medium also helps give the stamped area a softer “hand” (this term means softness and flexibility of the fabric) when it dries. This created the perfect consistency for dabbing on to the stamps with a foam brush.


I also used the stamp with metallic paints, Lumiere by Jacquard:


Here is the other half of the corn design, rolled around a recycled cardboard salt container:


I think this one (created by stamping several times) resembles a net, or some sort of cellular structure:


I have some projects in mind for these fabrics. Stay tuned!