Stamp carving

Mining the photos I've previously uploaded to dA, because I had to give the camera card reader back to the person I borrowed it from, so no new pics for a little while.


This was my first real foray into stamp carving. I used the bubblegum pink speedball stamp carving medium that comes with their kits. At the time I did this I only had a basic kit, and I'd lost one of the carving tool tips, so I did the whole thing with the v shaped one. I recommend against this, it takes forever to carve out large areas. I drew the design based on the composition of a piece of dragon art I found on dA, which I've now lost track of.

French Beaded Flowers

I got into french beaded flowers a few years ago, and I haven't done anything with them for a while. I love the organic look of the french beading technique (compared to the geometric victorian style, see the difference). But I already have tons of tchotchkes and I like to use my shelf space for storing useful stuff. So I've been holding off on the beaded flowers until I find more places to apply them. I've been thinking about jewelry, but I haven't quite gotten the technique worked out yet. Traditional french beaded flower assembly wraps all the pieces together to create a stem, which is great for flower arrangements but doesn't work for anything where the flower is flush to a surface -- it's hard to apply these flowers to hair accessories or purses. And they're REALLY heavy. Anyway, here's one of my favorite flowers. I did this with a gradient of four bead colors, so I had to string as I went rather than the usual practice of loading a ton of beads on the wire directly from the hank. It took even longer than usual, but I like the look.