Lessons

Lesson Info

Making Roller Stamps

One of the challenges that stamping sometimes presents is that you cover a very limited area obviously you could take the stand and do repetitive designs so I certainly could take that letter are that I carved and stamp it repeatedly all over a large sheet of paper but there is a little bit of a work around sometimes if you want to create a design that repeats itself over a larger sheet of paper and the way we're going to do that is by creating a roller stamp now I think most of you have a shipping tube at your work station excuse me these are just a standard have you do the shipping to their twelve inches in length two inches in diameter and we also have at our work stations sheets of adhesive backed foam and this is gonna work somewhat similar in concept but what we're going to be doing is cutting out some patterns from the foam it hearing them around the roller and at that point then we're going to as I described earlier apply some of our printer's ink onto a little piece of cardboa...

rd we're going to take our breyer ears which are these wonderful little like rubber rollers we're going to roll that ink out, roll our design across it and it's then going to allow us to prince onto a larger sheet of paper almost wallpaper style and go all the way up it um so there are a couple of things to keep in mind when you are creating a design like this and let's go through those one thing you do you want to be mindful of and we're going to do these by the way a little bit freeform style it's kind of a good exercise and maybe some abstract designs but you wanted design that is going to rap at least the majority of the way around the roller and the reason being is if I just say had a design that went along this line when I roll it through my paints obviously the rays portion is going to get painted here to the surface but then it's going to like go past that raised portion and the roller is going to hit the paint and we're going to get wrote so when you roll it out on your larger she you're going to get a design and then the rollers going to hit and you're going to get that large smudgy so it's really just a little bit of a balancing act so one really simple designed to do is stripes with this and that's the one I'm going to kind of pull together and let me show you this first and then we're going to kind of jump in and you guys can tackle a design of your own choosing this craft foam eyes really nice because it is adhesive backed it's just like a big sticker um it's got backing on it so you just peel it away in a village here right to, um the's surface that you intended for me get my kraft knife back and secure for the stripes I'm simply just going to be taking my straight edge, lining it up along the edge and cutting stripes in a variety of wits. This material cuts really easily. You can either do it with a craft knife or you can do it free form with scissors you, uh are not limited to just doing sort of like abstract designs. If you wanted to do something a little bit more detailed like what we did with the stamps, you certainly could transfer the image onto here. Cut it out. In fact, it could be kind of an interesting idea to take a siri's of letters perhaps spelling out someone's name and do them in variety a variety of positions around the roll and roll it out you can create custom gift wrapping paper you know it's just it's a nice way to create larger quantities sheets of paper with the decorative element for whatever your purpose might be. Honestly, the times that I have done this most frequently it has been either around the holidays or for someone's birthday when I really just wanted tio customize a gift that I was giving to them and it was a nice way to whatever the handmade gift might have been to continue that personal touch into the wrapping all right, so a nice variety of wits in these stripes here and so you'll see that obviously when you wrap it around it's a little bit longer than it needs to be so I'm simply going to take a pair of scissors and trim that off. Now I know that I am probably not going to get a perfect scene between the two of those, so what I'm going to do instead is kind of embrace the break and what I mean by that is you can see the break between my between my two lines here I'm going to do that with all of my stripes and just very the position of the break so that as I'm rolling out my pattern, it almost is going to give the effect of maybe bamboo or racing stripes or something along those lines, so once you are ready to go simply simply peel the backing off if it would come off she azam all right, way to go. So now that I've managed to get one piece field, um, I'm going to just position it where I would like it on the roller wrap it all the way around and I'm going to roughly stick them, you know, an equal distant amount now the great thing about this is, uh there's a lot of room for creativity things don't have to be lined up perfectly they could be more curvilinear lines. You could do a siri's of hearts that cover the entire exterior of the role you could just simple geometric shapes like I said, you could spell out words with it and that's where we're going to kind of let you play a little bit today so if you want, go ahead kind of think about the design that you'd like to create you can either cut it out free form again using your craft knife or a pair of scissors on dh, then it's like we're all eight again, we're going to be playing with stickers and applying them to the's, cardboard tubes and these materials, by the way, these are really intended his children's craft supplies, you'll find them sort of in the children's crafting section at craft supply stores or even at office supply stores, or you can certainly order them online like I did so let's. Go ahead and get started and I'm going to continue applying some of these to the exterior and after we spent a little bit top of time cutting out our designs and applying them to no thie shipping tubes were then going to delve into theat application of the printing ink and showing how to roll that out and apply it to our larger sheets of paper so any thoughts of our our students in the audience of what direction you might want to go with some of your designs? I love dragon blaster. I'm sketching a few drinks. I love it. I was going to see oh, good. We're very simpatico over. Yeah, I like that. Teo graphic sort of abstract design. Nice, nice, nice. I'm going to attempt a floral buying perfect. We'll say I love that might be ambitious no it's. Good. Well, in the thing with this'ii piece of foam teo, you can peel it off, you know you can't let it sit for a super long time, but you can peel it off occasionally. If there's enough tack left on the back side, you can reposition it or you can just discard it and cut a piece that's more to your liking. Andi put it in its place. So again, just, uh, being mindful of the fact that you want to have some design elements all the way around the tubes so that when you roll it out onto the ink um there is no portion of the tube that is left touching the thank you wanted all this sort of be raised on. I do tend to leave a few inches at least on either end of the tube, just as some place too I place my hands when I'm rolling it out almost like, say, french rolling pin where you don't have the handles you just need to roll it right along the surface of the pin itself so I have seen in some hardware stores that they have rollers that are intended to add a wallpaper effect when you're painting your home you paint a base coat and then you would get something that looked almost like the breyer that had raised design similar to what we're creating on the tube to create that sort of beautiful beautiful vertical repetitive design. So this is something in the same vein and I do have to say that you know a lot of the projects that we're going to be tackling over the course of today and tomorrow there are versions of them that are kid friendly so that if you have children or nieces or nephews or you know kids in your neighborhood that you baby sits aa lot of these can be adapted so that they're safe to do with children and this is definitely one of them you know with some kids safe scissors and some of this adhesive foam they could totally go to town on these and create some really fantastic designs and again just a brief referenced earlier today when we were working on the paper making absolutely kids are great with the paper making I had mentioned I think at that time that I no of elementary school teachers that do these do that with their students so it can be a fun activity and can be one that parents who want to do maybe a craft that's a little bit more refined with their kids you know you can tailor your end results according to what you add into those paper mixtures so um a lot of flexibility there which I love cheryl does this work with systems as well? Do you really think that you know it's very easy to cut with scissors sometimes it just depends on the design that you're creating what sort of control you want often you can get better control with a craft knife if you've got something that's a little bit more intricate um yeah, absolutely you can use scissors with possible I mean, I think parents might be a bit a little bit nervous back knives with oh, I went around but know this might be a good solution exactly that's what I think kids safe scissors I would definitely not recommend craft knives for young children um older kids with parents supervision of course and you'll find you in the process of applying this to the exterior of the shipping tubes that the phone really has a little stretch to it so you can even though I've cut out a straight piece I can kind of manipulate that into a little bit of a subtle curve um just so that it doesn't seem quite, it might seem a little bit more organic and less specifically geometrically defined. Now, I should say, all of our ladies here, I've got very, very intricate, very good job of demonstrating their portable teacher to shame that's what they're doing, I think we'll get a shot of what kathy is working on her because you're doing some beautiful, really lovely, very delicate believes, but I'd say the colored foam would work better just because it's sometimes is appealing this intricate thing. It's hard to tell where the paper is and where the film is. You know, when you're using white that's a little hard to sense a good point and they do tend to come in multi packs, I have not seen them where you can just specifically pick one color, but that is true. I can see how the visibility would be a little different without the contrast of a colored foam. This is also your dosing doing flowers or petals thinks she's got direct, right? Yes, and they're just kind of freaked when I'm not doing anything. Details madeleine is just not very good is good but I can't see quite well give you time to get working on love phyllis working with scissors in the film how do you feel the level of control is is it a problem with it? I'm used to cutting things out with scissors cannot turn the turn the item I'm working with instead of the scissors right now working through that way very good now rachel's doing something I think a little more similar to what robert stupid in a slightly more abstract style yes, I love that it's almost like a geometric webbing you're kind of working around here I like the idea of the stripes that I was like I kind of wanted to do something like fractured but just kind of going with it and seeing what happened perfect and again these materials are really relatively inexpensive, so I think that you can feel like you can give yourself permission tio experiment a little bit without feeling as though you're wasting something extremely costly and again when you get to the end of it. If you're done with your design, you can peel that film right off and reuse your shipping tube for something else so you don't necessarily have to feel like you're locked into a specific design if you get to the end of it you're like, you know I really wish I had done something different cell I was initially a little bit concerned not knowing how sturdy the tack would be on the back of this adhesive foam but I've done several of these and allow them to sit over the course of a couple of weeks and I haven't had an issue with them appealing up it all which I was pleasantly surprised by I just had sort of assumed that maybe because it was ah children's crafting material that it might not be as sturdy as I had hoped but that turned out not to be the case so that was a happy surprise I am just cutting out a few additional stripes to kind of finish up my design and again you can see that I'm leaving a few inches on either end we'll hear some boos in oz what's going on over there madeleine has it been ok with that madeleine is creating some giant bug patterns which are beautiful I know j k o had mentioned a little bit earlier that madeleine is creative lives artist in residence and I can definitely see some correlation between the shape she's cutting out and some pictures I have seen you paint a big beat okay last week I love that um madeleine has a wonderful instagram stream if you're not following her it's worth spending some time to get on there to see some of the amazing work that she's doing while she is artist in residence here creative live says that john paul george or ringo e I like just random this's cool writes it allows you to sort of play a little freeform you certainly could following template um you could pick a specific design like we did earlier on dh follow that but sometimes it's nice just to allow yourself to play with the elements and see how they come together. Why you ladies air kind of finishing up applying your designs to the exterior of the rollers I am going to go ahead and start putting together some of the paint to show you how this is going to play out. We're gonna be dealing with some longer sheets of paper you confined these at office supply stores are supply stores you can even use solid color wrapping paper, which is often really nice because then you've got the color contrast of the wrapping paper with whatever your ink color of choice is. So we're going to be working with just some simple basic greens and yellows today, and what I'm going to do is I'm going toe just squirt a small amount out smeared out onto a piece of corrugated cardboard you could use its not corrugated it's just a piece of cardboard, but any piece of cardboard like this will work well you just wanted to be a smooth, flat surface I'm also going to squeeze out a small amount of the yellow you don't need a lot of paint initially and I always suggest just starting out with a little bit less than you think you might need this is where our breyer comes in and these air genius little tools because it's basically going to allow me to take these very lumpy shamir's of paints on my work surface and blend them together and just sort of, you know, rolling back and forth and I don't want them completely blended I could overwork this until I get a really lovely sort of like citrusy lime green but I like some of the variation I'm seeing here so I'm going to leave that as is I set my breyer aside and when you get to this point I would just suggest kind of going around your tube making sure that everything is it heared snugly to it you don't have any ends that air sort of flipping up and loose and then really what you want to do is just want to kind of roll it along the surface of the paint and you can see first pass it covered it partially but I'm going to kind of keep working it around two covers much of the raised film as possible and if you get to the point where it just feels like um perhaps there was not enough paint you can always add more all rights so as you can see my phone was red and uh by pretty stark contrast, you can see most of it is now covered in the yellow and green. There are little areas you can see that perhaps the phone was just bent down. It didn't come in as close contact with thean hq. I can simply take my roller and go over that a little bit. There's another area here you can see it's just not quite covered the way wanted to. So I'm gonna go over that a little bit more now. It's always an experiment you never know what you're going to get, but let's see what we get as far as the first pass on this. So you're just going to firmly press it down and start to roll it and you kind of manipulate your hands. You're working along and you see, it gets a little bit lighter as we're working our way up. But I kind of like that it's a nice sort of abstract, irregular pattern. You can see that there were areas where I went back with the brush the second time around to touch up some of the areas I didn't feel like touch with the paint, it's added another dimension of texture to it, which I think is kind of fascinating. I have done projects like this where we have done a first round a couple of times with ah solid color that we've allowed it to dry, and then we have gone back a second time with another color and rolled it along almost to get the same sort of off registration look that we got when we were using some of our rubber stamps, so if you were at a point where you feel like you want to be, break out the paint, go ahead and kind of clear yourself a little work surface there, I know that everybody's got some cardboard to work with. We are just working with the two paint colors today, so you cannot to do solids on either ones or play around a little bit with some mixtures and kind of going back and referencing where I was talking about, leaving the breaks in between some of the lines and doing it in the green. It does almost come away with a little bit of a bamboo effect and what I actually think would be kind of interesting. Having done this would be to go back then and maybe take a rubber stamp and carve out some leaf designs to kind of supplement that and use those two in conjunction conjunction with one another toe create a little bit more of ah, you know, a bamboo forest type idea, so I'm going to rollers, this's an application for you could use this for several things. I think probably them most easily accessible idea would be easier for wrapping paper. The holidays, it's a really nice way to sort of customize the paper that you're using sometimes, if it's a really special gift, and you wantto coordinate it with, uh, the exterior of the packaging, you could do a design that sort of coordinates with whatever the gift is, and I kind of love that if you are doing, say, origami are their paper folding crafts, you could pattern your own paper, allow it to dry, cut it down to the appropriate square sizes, and go ahead and use that I mean, that's, really? The beauty of it is that it's just a way of decorating the paper for a multitude of uses. Have you ever used this on a fabric? Maybe on a t shirt, a llama? I have not, but I love that idea, like we were talking about earlier with some of the banks that are definitely our ranks that our fabric appropriates, and that would be washable once they've been applied to the fabric. And I think that would be a great way to customize some of your some of your articles of clothing for a wallpaper or wallpaper that you could actually do the roll straight onto the wall wouldn't actually really already papered you could, you know? Yeah, interesting, yeah, great idea. Very simple. And what a great very simple, very versatile, which I like that about because, again, this is one of those ones where you could go as detailed or a simple as you'd like. Phyllis, I love the dragonflies that's so good and again, if it does get a little bit messy, we do have those baby wipes on hands and paper towels kind of help, I think control some of the mess. All of these inks are water based, and I usually recommend those, especially if you're doing this project with children. Um, it just makes clean up so much easier. I love this nice and fun, they're like this, but it was a good crash question that j k brought up about application. I mean, can you ladies think of other things that you might end up being able to use something like this for? I mean, one thought I think I had wass I love bookbinding projects, and I'm always looking for decorative papers to cover the handmade books with, and I think this could be kind of a clever way to create some repetitive patterns to, um, do that. Finished production that's lovely. I like that I'm gonna actually I know I just think to this up but I'm going to walk around for a second to kind of get enough a look at I hope this rationing kind of get an idea of rachel's design I mean again it is because we are rolling this out the ink is not always consistent in the application to it but I also think that's part of the charm I love the way it's sort of like fades in and out and with multiple passes you could create a more even layered look but you think is great and phyllis has been working on her dragonflies greater these like that well, this can I hold this office? I love the way that they just free for now I just kind of itches freeform she cut them all out by hand and I just think it's really lovely and again this is one where she could do the first passed with this sort of yellowy green allow it to dry and then perhaps go back over it a little bit later with a different color palette like at in an orange or you know something along those lines this is perfect act this is this is the colors my grant, my craft ring perfect greens and yellows I love it, I love it and madeleine, with her intricate bugs here, may I hold this up, my friend, definitely look how cool this is. She's created all of these lovely little leg tentacled beetles and is covering thie entire tube with them. I think these air fantastic, it's very, very nice, thank you. Sneak a different variety of what's, come up. What would come up with it is excellent, excellent.