Stamp carving with Brown Owls

I hadn't been to a Brown Owls meeting in such a long time, so it was great to be back and crafting with other people again.

This month's activity was stamp carving, and there are some great tutorials listed for it if you're interested. I'd been a little disheartened by my attempt to carve lino, but carving erasers was a much nicer experience!

It's nice to be able to give it a go, ink it, and then make adjustments. For instance, I had to get rid of a bit in the corner of the robo-postbox one. Also, don't forget to reverse things like writing if you are drawing directly on to the stamp... that's how I ended up with an exclamation mark before the envelope!


These are the sketches I worked from... and I'd love to think up some more. These will be great for stamping envelopes with. Check out the meet's stamping round-up for some great inspiration!

English paper piecing with the Brown Owls

Last Sunday I attended Canberra's September Brown Owls get together. The theme was open, so I brought along the English paper piecing kit from a previous meet-up. Even though I missed that get together, I saw what the others got up to and wanted to give it a go myself.

You can make the templates yourself, or buy them. If you're in Australia, Lizard of Oz specialises in English Paper piecing and appliqué.

If you're interested in giving it a go, or simply want an explanation about what it's about, Sunshine has a pretty comprehensive post on it. She also has an alternative design you can use.

The method I was kindly taught by a fellow Brown Owl was mildly different: when basting the fabric to the cardboard shape, we pinned down two opposing edges of the hexagon, then creased all the other sides of the fabric over the edge. When it came to the threading, we stuck a needle through a corner of the hexagon near one of the pins, then put it through the middle of the side, and up again through the next corner and do on and so forth until we got all the way around.

In the photo above, I'd already cut the basting stitches and removed the cardboard template from the central hexagon, to be able to reuse it. I used some leftover scraps from a reversible tote I recently made.

Freezer paper stencils with Brown Owls

Today I went to my first Brown Owls meeting. The theme was freezer paper stencils, so I prepared a few different stencils and settled on one based on Manu Chao. The actual stencil I used was copied from a picture I took of one on a wall in South America, and it's clearly based on the following photo of him:

It was a fair amount of work cutting out all the details, but it was all worth it when the design was finally trasferred onto the (otherwise unappealing) fabric...

{source: kukita}

There were plenty of great things made that afternoon, including two t-shirts and some fabric destined to make eco-friendly veggie bags:

{source: kukita} {source: kukita} {source: quilting mick}

I'm glad I heard about Brown Owls, and that there's a group in Canberra. I'm looking forward to trying out a bunch of new crafts... in the meantime, I'll get some friends together for some more freezer paper stencilling!

If you want to try this for yourself, check out Neither Hip nor funky's tutorial, Angry Chicken's tutorial or do a quick search on Craftster. Also check out All Buttoned Up's post on using hole punchers.