stamp workshop: student work

I forgot to post some photos of work students have done in the past in my stamp workshops. I'm usually having such a good time with the class that I forget to take photos, but here are shots from a couple different workshops: 

some instagram shots from a recent class:

and some photos from a class a couple years ago:
Cathy made a couple lunar stamps & she made a beautiful series of tags w/different color combinations.

Wendy's tags:

one student made super-cute miniature portrait of each person in her family:

and a couple more shots:

Feliz Workshop

I'll be teaching a couple of workshops at the upcoming Feliz Sale in Austin, on Saturday November 3rd. You can see more details here and sign up for the classes here.
My workshop will be a crash course in relief printing, using hand-carved stamps to print without a press. With the holiday season approaching, I'll be emphasizing using the stamps to create wrapping paper & tags, but I'll also show you methods for printimg on fabric. I'll post below a bunch of photos of stamps I've made for classes in the past & patterns I've created with them. I've gotten kind of obsessed with pattern design lately & stamps are a fantastic way of experimenting with shapes & patterns. I'll bring along some books on pattern design, so you can also get a crash course in repeats, and how to turn a small image into a large pattern. 

a recent fish stamp:

that became this pattern:

Here is a pile of stamps I've made through the years:

and some prints I've made with them:

this continuous pattern was made out of a single square:

Every participant will get a take-home "stamp kit" with stamps, carving knives, stamp pad, papers & fabric to print on & image idea sheets so you don't have to dream up a design yourself if you don't want to.

and here are a couple packages packaged in stamp wrappers, fabric & paper:

Feliz Sale Austin TX

I'm very excited to be participating in the Feliz Sale in Austin, TX, November 2-4. Read all about it here. The sale will be on Sunday at The Palm Door in downtown Austin from 12-6 (they've been rolling out the "makers" on the Feliz blog & everything looks amazing) and on Saturday there will be workshops. I'm teaching a version of my hand-carved stamps class, with an emphasis on making wrapping paper & tags. Your can read about the workshop here, and I'll be posting more photos here on my blog of what the workshop will involve, to whet your appetite. 
I used to live in Texas, and many of my friends still do, so I always look forward to a visit.

Workshop at UCLA's Fowler Museum

I'll be teaching a relief printing workshop @ UCLA's Fowler Museum on July 14th. Here's the link to sign up-(click here!)-last I checked there were still a few spots open. It's an affordable way to take my block printing class & also includes a tour of their current exhibit of Tibetan woodblock prints. Because it's a relatively short class we'll be concentrating on carving small images that you can repeat to make into larger images or patterns, & we'll be printing on both paper & fabric.

in stores now!

our labels/tags/recipe cards have hit the stores (or at least the internet).

printing recipe cards, one at a time.

Some photos from before I started printing the recipe cards two-at-a-time. 

and a video:

so much to do & everything's a mess

Alex took a lot of pictures during the darkest printing-15-hours-a-day moments, thanks Alex!, wherein I'd be wearing crazy can't-leave-the-house-in outfits.

Late night in the messy garage:

Womack keeping guard outside the garage:

guillotine-ing.

First thing I'm going to do when we wrap this up is CLEAN, I swear it.

boxes and boxes of boxes

We've been hard at work since April on a mind-blowingly large order from Williams Sonoma (probably not large for them, but positively insane from this one-person print shop's perspective). All other printing projects have been back-burnered in favor of seeing this through, and the back house/shack has filled, emptied, re-filled, emptied, and filled again with piles of boxes of boxes. Now that we're on the downslope, we can all look back at this time fondly, but as you'll see in subsequent posts, it involved a lot of late-night printing and hoarder level messes.