Napkin Stamping

These were made as a wedding gift for some friends and I just finally finished and delivered them last week. They didn't turn out exactly as planned - stamping with textile paint on dark fabric is much, much harder than I had anticipated.

I made the napkins myself from a dark brown twill. I also carved the stamps - the ones you can see here are papyrus and lotus columns drawn from ancient Egyptian motifs. I also had adorable golden flies, but didn't get a photo.

For the green metallic paint I would up sponge-brushing the paint onto the stamp, which is why they're a bit blobby.

For the blue, which was not metallic, I cobbled together a stamp pad with some papertowels. This used quite a lot of paint and wasn't really saveable for future use, but worked resonably well.

Using a brayer didn't work at all. I'm not sure if that's because I have a cheap-ass brayer, if it wasn't suited to working with acrylic paint, or if I just suck.

For the golden flies (no photo) I sponge-brushed again.

I did discover that re-carving some lines helped with the blobbiness.

In the future I don't know that I'll do long, thin motifs, especially with long straight lines.
I will probably also stick to lighter colored fabrics in the immediate future as I've had much better results with them.

I also plan to get some screenprinting ink to experiment with to see if I can get a better result on a variety of colors.

The battery in our digital camera died, so unfortunately the only half-way decent picture we were able to get was with my phone. :P

Bit late "today"

I slept through most of the day (again) and then caught up in crafty stuff before posting for Thursday.  

I've been having fun decoupaging a pencil box to hold a gift for my parents.  And I've just finished (for now) a very mediocre, if not outright bad watercolor.  Playing with paints was fun, though.  

I still haven't gotten around to deciding on my linoleum stamp designs.  So, that's being put-off until tomorrow.

I'm still being bedeviled by headaches and backaches, despite getting plenty of sleep.  At least today's headache didn't start until I'd been up for a little while.  

Today's episode of Star Trek was "The Conscience of the King" (actually, I watched The Menagerie too, but didn't notice anything snark worthy)

Notable details:

• Lenore Karidian's fur (fake) minidress when she comes aboard to beg for a ride.  I can't find a photo, which seriously upsets me.
• "All this power, throbbing and surging, yet under control."  Wow, that was really damn subtle, there, Lenore.
• Riley shouldn't have been sent down to engineering to protect him.  He totally deserved some pain and possible death after his stupid-ass shenanigans in The Naked Time. Especially the singing.  Lenore's attempt at murder was totally deserved.  
• Dude, phaser overload - why not just leave?  Also, are the captain's quarters really open to anyone?  Or is it just anyone of the female persuasion?  Or are we supposed to infer that Lenore spent the night and popped the phaser in the light box while Kirk was freshening up?
• Are there no dental or DNA records in the 23rd Century?  Kodos/Karidian and the body burned beyond recognition?  Dental records were used in forensics in the 1960s.  Surely a sci-fi writer could have extrapolated the idea of DNA identification.  
• Lenore has a serious case of the bat-shit crazies.  
• According to the Memory Alpha entry for this episode, Matt Groening named Kang and Kodos after Star Trek characters - Kang come from the episode Day of the Dove.

Imitation Predynastic Pot

Because I am a huge, huge nerd, I decided that I needed to spiffy up the terracotta planter we bought with some painting.  It took me forever to decide what to do, though, until inspiration struck - I could use some Egyptian motifs!  Now, with a few exceptions, most Egyptian pottery after the Predynastic period is pretty boring, so of course I stuck with the Predynastic.  In particular, I borrowed some motifs from white cross-lined ware - a boat, a dancing figure, and a hippo.  And here is the painted pot, sitting next to some papyrus stalks.