You guys! #CarveDecember 2022 starts tomorrow!!!! As always, everyone is welcome to join. New stamp carvers will develop their skills quickly and experienced stamp carvers will sharpen those skills. Everyone will connect with new friends. Here's the basics: Carve a stamp. Print it. Post the print to instagram. Use the hashtag #CarveDecember. Here are the 2022 #CarveDecember prompts: If you manage to carve a stamp every day in December, great! If you just do one day, great! If you use the prompts, great! If you don't use the prompts, great! You can find a list of my favorite supplies as... Read more →

Tomorrow night I will host the November Member Livestream where members can ask questions ahead of time (whether or not they can't attend the livestream) as well as during the event. We all meet on Zoom and discuss making art, selling art, organizing art, art tools, art techniques...so many things! (The replay is always in the classroom for anyone who misses it.) And since we are just wrapping up November and about to enter December, I thought I'd share all of the fun member goodies with you from both November and December! November's Real Time Video is this giant doodle... Read more →

Hey friends! Here's the round-up for November 2022: What's happening at home? My little guy turned 3!!! Also, I put together a super cute Christmas countdown calendar for him and hung it over the fireplace: Pro parenting tip: I put one piece of candy from his Halloween stash in each bag! ScanNCut Club members can watch the tutorial video for this project HERE. What's on your desk right now? Here are the highlights: Leafy Collage stencil Gelatin Printed rice paper Sketchbook Very dirty and stinky paint water Matte Gel Medium (I've been using buckets and buckets of it lately) Score... Read more →

To all who celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope it's a good one! To make it even a little bit sweeter, I'm offering a this-weekend-only discount code for my self-paced online classes: 20% off any self-paced class other than my two newest classes, The Artful Holiday and The Carve December Workbook. Use the code THANKFUL at checkout to get the discount. This code is good until Monday, November 28 at midnight EST. Happy Thanksgiving! Read more →

Today, I'm delighted to bring you another installment of my "Get Smart About Art" series. Today I want to share paper cut illustrator Alice Lindstrom. Her bio on her website says: "Alice works in paper collage, using cut and paste techniques, painting and preparing the paper beforehand, before cutting and assembling it to create textured and painterly collages. Alice's aesthetic draws on diverse influences, including mid-century illustration and design, folk art as well as Modern art movements." Here's a peek at some of her beautiful work: In this short video you can see Alice Lindstrom in her studio working on... Read more →

If you know me, you know that I looooove place cards. However, we will only be four people at this year's Thanksgiving and so there's really no need for place cards. But I wanted to add something homemade to the table decor. I finally settled on utensil pockets and they are my new favorite thing to make. So fun! I plan to create many many variations for every possible holiday. Take a peek: And I put together a tutorial video that takes you through the process. It's really so easy and so customizable. Make these from scrapbook paper, hand painted... Read more →

Hooray and Hurrah! #CarveDecember 2022 is just around the corner. All the fun begins on December 1. As always, everyone is welcome to join. New stamp carvers will develop their skills quickly and experienced stamp carvers will sharpen those skills. Everyone will connect with new friends. Here's the basics: Carve a stamp. Print it. Post the print to instagram. Use the hashtag #CarveDecember. Here are the 2022 #CarveDecember prompts: If you manage to carve a stamp every day in December, great! If you just do one day, great! If you use the prompts, great! If you don't use the prompts,... Read more →

I am vending at two upcoming holiday markets. The first one is for the Watertown Business Coalition's Fall Fest on Thursday. The second is for the Whoville Jubilee on December 3. To prepare for the markets, I've been making things, packaging things, and getting everything ready. In my experience, at the markets I sell at, most people are interested in smaller and lower priced items. Impulse buy kind of stuff. So, one of the things I've been making a ton of is one-of-a-kind handmade greeting cards! Plus some hand printed sets of block printed cards: I like to finish all... Read more →

On Friday night, I taught my "Chine-Collé Live" class on Zoom and it was super fun! I started with the basics of printing with block printing ink. And then I moved on to the basics of the chine-collé process. We discussed collaging during the process vs. collaging first. And I demonstrated how to do both. Then I moved through demonstrations of different methodologies for cutting the collage paper. Then it was time to get fancier with the levels of layering. We discussed the importance of backgrounds and I demonstrated four different ideas. Finally, I shared how to do chine-collé with... Read more →

I have a new class for you! This exciting new workshop is a three-month immersion into the process of creating better stamps. Maybe you're a #CarveDecember veteran? Perhaps you've participated somewhat in #CarveDecember? Or you might not even know what the heck #CarveDecember is?! Since 2014 (wow), I have been hosting #CarveDecember. Here are the basics: Carve a stamp. Print it. Post the print to instagram. Use the hashtag #CarveDecember. It's that simple. Here's a look at all of the stamps I carved during #CarceDecember last year: Over the eight years that I've done this daily stamp carving project, I've... Read more →