I repurposed this gift box into a nice storage box by doing some decoupage work on the lid. First I glued down antique imagery. Next I rubber stamped harmonious images onto gold and white tissue paper with Staz On permanent rubber stamp ink and glued those pieces down. After that layer was dry, I brushed varnish over the whole box top for durability.
Check out my Pinterest board for sources of free images to download and print out – Free Graphics and Fonts.
I had some fun this weekend using stamps from the faux postage collection from Carolyn’s Stamp Store to make postal art for Valentine projects.
Images with an all-over design like the one above work well for header
graphics because you can accommodate it to several different sizes and formats. I like to change headers on my various web accounts seasonally. Here are the image sizes you will need for some popular web sites:
Facebook – 646 x 220
Google + – 823 x 464
Etsy – 760 x 100
If you’d like to make your own Valentine Faux Postage, I designed a special rubber stamp set to make it easier – Valentine Faux Postage Helpers Unmounted.
Antique doll displayed in shadow box made of a Necco Wafer box that
looks like it’s probably from the 1930s. It has carnival imagery on the
outside, so I decoupaged carnival imagery on the inside and built a
hollow box for displaying the doll. There is a band of archival paper
holding the doll onto the box.
Stamping on tissue paper can be very useful for planning out rubber stamped designs. This arrangement was made while I was designing a stamped border of hand carved rubber stamps for my kitchen, to which I’m trying to give a Santa Fe look.
You could use plain ordinary scrap paper and not tissue paper, but tissue paper has the advantage of being transparent. Transparency is a great aid to planning designs in which the paper bits might overlap, since you can see the orientation of the design below through the translucent paper. In the example below, I am upcycling a worn out and cracked wooden cutting board. I filled in the cracks with spackling paste, sanded, and am in the process of building up the design with sponging, stenciling and stamping. I will put cork strips on the bottom to make it into a trivet.
Some of the stamp designs you see above are available in a smaller size in my shop – check out my Petroglyph Rubber Stamps.