From Perfect Stamping to Perfect Lathering

Just so you know, it sometimes really hurts my head to try to come up with a catchy title.  I'm workin' hard here!  Anyway......this is week 4 of the Making Art! challenge on the Wendy Vecchi yahoo group.  Much like the Compendium of Curiosities weekly challenges where we make art inspired by techniques in Tim Holtz's book, we are basing our creations here on projects from any of Wendy's three (the fourth is due out any minute now) books.  This week, we are to make a tag, and use Wendy's perfect stamping technique.  Now, she calls it perfect stamping, not because she's an egomanic, but because it involves Perfect Pearls.  Check it out on page 10 of Book 1, or.....click here to learn about it on her blog.

This is a super cool technique, and involves a way to stamp that I don't think I would have thought up on my own.  That is one of the things I most admire about Wendy.  She is so good at figuring out new ways to use the products we already have.  So, here is my tag:

The tag was first inked with these distress inks:  peeled paint, shabby shutters, and broken china.  For the perfect stamping, I used black soot and chipped sapphire with turquoise perfect pearls, and the background stamp from Well Worn Art.

When that was dry, I added the swirly flowers from Botanical Art, stamped with olive archival ink.  The alphabet along the right side is from Lower Case Art, and was stamped with black archival ink.  The phrase dare to be unique is from Seriously Art.  Yep, I have LOTS of Wendy's stamps.

The rosette was leftover from a previous project, and I topped it with a butterfly using Wendy's latest genius technique.....combining her Clearly For Art plastic with a sheet of metal.  To find out more about this, and why I think it's genius (or magic), click here.  The butterfly stamp and the little spider (stamped with black soot and embossed with black EP) are both also from Botanical Art.

What else?  Oh, the scallop trim on the bottom was cut with Tim's on the edge die and it is tissue tape over cardstock, inked with fired brick.  And yes, that is a pen nib I used as the body of the butterfly.  Speaking of which, did I ever score big on the nib.  Last Saturday when I trekked to Brooklyn to visit the Sketchbook Project, I found, amongst the various paper products, old books, etc. they were selling to earn some $$, an unopened box, original packaging.....containing a gross (that's 144 for those of you who were as bad in math as I was) of the nibs for $12.  Perfect (that word again) condition, and I'd say at least 50 years old.

And my segue into the perfect lathering portion of this program.....another cool thing I did last weekend was attend a workshop in felted soap.  Right here in my building.  We have a large community room and often one of us will share a skill by giving a class.  I occasionally do something with paper, but this time my neighbor Theresa showed us how to cover a bar of soap with unspun wool.  It was wet, it was easy, it was fun, and I love my soap (which, by the way, is lavender scented and heavenly):

Why cover a bar of soap with wool?  1) it makes the soap last longer  2) it is very pretty   3) the soap is no longer slippery  and
4) it is like having soap and washcloth in one.

Theresa asked for $6 to cover the cost of materials, and just so you know, Anthropologie sells felted soap for $14 a bar.  I'd send you to Theresa's blog, if only she had one.  She also makes gorgeous hats, scarves, wall hangings, and even boots with the wet felt method.  If you'd like to see a DIY on felted soap just put that in your search engine and you'll see lots of examples, even one from Martha.