Wood Block Printing Experiments!

I picked up these three stamps in the summer of 2015 at the beautiful Maiwa Handprints store in the Granville Island Market in Vancouver.

I gave the flower and leaf to my mom, a very crafty individual and one of my biggest artistic allies.  Each stamp is a work of art, time, and skill, which inspired us to try fabric stamping–something neither of us had ever done before (well, aside from the vegetable variety….). But when would we find the time?

This year I’ve been taking on fewer costume design commitments to give myself time to recharge creatively, so I suggested dedicating a weekend visit to this endeavor. In the meantime, Mom had been collecting white tea towels, and even a couple of tablecloths to use as our base textiles. So last weekend when she came to visit we jumped right in!

We set up a bed, layering plastic to protect the table followed by scrap fabric and towels to absorb stray paint. The paint/ink we bought at a local craft store, as well as some Lumiere and NeoOpaque acrylic paint by Jacquard in a lucky Goodwill find!

We learned the basic technique from the following videos:

• He makes it look so easy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myADva7NOr4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n9NOPWcWFU

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We had a blast experimenting with blending paint/ink colors, layering, saturation, and spacing….leave perfectionism at the door! Truly, the barrier to entry to this project was so minimal! I really encourage anyone who’s curious to give this ancient craft a try.

Other Resources:

• Instruction sheet for a variety of textile manipulations from Maiwa: https://maiwa.com/pages/instructions