I made a stamp!

Hello - I have a bit of a different card today - not because of the colours, or the techniques, or the design, but because the leaf stamp that I used is handmade. 

Handmade by me!!!

My brother gave me a lino cutter and stamp carving kit a little while ago. It has some little rubber discs and a mini lino-cutting tool and blades, so that you can design and carve your own stamps! (The kit is from a company in the UK called Essdee - you can find them HERE). 

So, you start with a blank white disk of adhesive-backed rubber:

 You draw your design on it in pencil:

 You get out the appropriate blades - I remembered a little bit about doing lino cutting in school, and I started with the smallest blade to carve the detail, and then used the wider blade to remove the background:

I then decided to cut the stamp down so there was less background, and I mounted it onto an old acrylic block to test it with black ink.  This allowed me to decide which bits needed to be carved out a bit more:

I then cleaned it thoroughly before inking it with Versamark to white-emboss the leaves. Then I blended some Twisted Citron, Lucky Clover and Peacock Feathers Distress Inks over the top, then stamped the leaf using the same ink colours over the top. I wiped the excess ink of the top off the white embossing with the ink blending tool. 

 I then prepped the card surface with my powder tool, before I used my MIST to stamp the sentiment from Simon Says Stamp's "Big Scripty Greetings" in Versafine Onyx Black ink, and then embossed with clear embossing powder.

 Thanks for visiting :)