Thursday, March 10, 2016

Thrifty homemade helpers

When my dearly beloved and I travel, we love to shop antique, thrift and junk stores. He has treasures that he hunts and I just hunt.

Most of my hunting consists of finding things to use in my art. One thing I love is the old wood handled message stamps once used by businesses. My growing collection has made me long for a rotating holder to keep them all in one location. It was hard to contain my reserved, cool exterior when I found this treasure. Best of all, it came with 4 stamps and cost $8.


 Happy ... that's what I am. Well... happy and organized.

A week later, another city, another store, I found this stamp with its ominous warning from a nameless insurance company. For $1 I could not resist adding it to my new holder.


I love the look of the small font text, but the message was too blatant. There had to be a way to push the message to the background without doing damage the stamp. So... I taped together - in random fashion - a few of the little scraps of paper ... 


used them as a mask and "yay!"... the fading of the You-are-hereby-cancelled message.


And, while I was finding uses for little scraps of paper, I discovered that punching squares makes quite an interesting, not quite so factory perfect, mini stencil. When I wear this out, I know just where to get a new one! Best of all, I can use this on anything without buying permission.
 

It's personally encouraging to make something that is completely original, your own brain-child. Makes me want to do it again.

A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps. Proverbs 16:9

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