Belle Armoire and stamps

Sometime last year Judy Wilkinfeld mentioned she had been working on some new castings and asked if I would make a piece of jewellery to utilize one of her dolls. I felt very privileged to be asked as the work was going to be published in Belle Armoire Jewelry magazine by Somerset Studio. Judy also asked Jen Crossley, Deryn Mentock, Diana Frey and Kecia Deveney if they would produce a piece too. It's amazing how different the pieces we all created were using the same doll.

I don't usually work with dolls in my jewellery as they seem to be everywhere, but these little creatures where lovely to work with.
I was able to easily drill into the doll so that I could attach it to the huge star washer with brass wire and brass nuts. I made the steel chain and soldered all of the links. I added some of my hand made fabric beads and an assortment of semi precious stone beads to complete the project.

I'm very grateful to Judy for giving me the opportunity to participate in this enjoyable project. Judy has these lovely little dolls available in her Etsy store.





I've also added some new stamps to my etsy store.

Stamps

I had a great decorated papers and journal workshop on Sunday. The students all went home with fabulous journals that they had created. The class was go, go, go. We were so busy I didn't get to take any photos, which was very disappointing as there were some lovely papers produced.

I've also been making stamps. I managed to find the blue blocks at Paperific when it was in Melbourne. I made some of the images from Indian wood blocks that I have. The wood blocks are great for using with paint but are not very successful with stamp pads, so I decided to imprint them into the blue blocks. Now I can print them with stamp pads. To create the stamps you heat the block with a heat gun then press an image into it. I would suggest you do this outside and I even use a mask, I'm very conscious of what damage the fumes can do to your body. The black stamps are a material that I got from the reverse garbage Art Truck in Ringwood. It looked the same and I had brought home quite a lot of it. As usual I'd forgotten I had it until Joy, in my altered book class, mentioned she had some and wondered if it would work. I gave it a try and these are the results. The cogs are the cardboard ones that you buy in a packet. I spread them out on a brick then heated the foam and voila, they worked.





This is a page from my journal. I loved the expression on the woman's face.

Journal and stamps

Some more journal pages, as I've said before I work at random throughout the journal. The top two pictures show the pages on the right ready to take some images, or drawing, or whatever takes my fancy at the time. I find an image and search until I find the right page or draw things as they come into my head. The pages are never finished, I go back and add things to them all the time. Much of the drawing work is done sitting at the traffic lights, as it takes me an hour night and morning to get to and from work, it certainly passes the time and sometimes I'm even hoping for a red light.

The bottom page is my 'grunge' page the image on the right of flowers and rocks was a transfer from a colour laser print, I used gel medium to transfer it to my page, my stamped art was already on the page, I added text and birds after.

I carve the stamps out of plastic erasers, in most cases using both sides of the eraser. The stencil and stamp are cut out of cardboard. I'm making a set of alphabet stamps at present.

Better get back to the jewellery, only two and a half hours til bedtime