Crusade No. 18

The crusade this month over at the GPP Street Team blog is to 'cut it out'. To design and cut a stencil or rubberstamp. I am sure some of you could guess that I would be carving some cogs since I love them and can't seem to find any cool cog rubberstamps out there. The top five stamps in the pic below I made for me. The smaller black cog I did years ago and still like since it has gotten some wear and tear and looks battered up when stamped. For the numbers rubberstamp: the numbers are significant and it was intentional to have the numbers backwards when stamped.

Now if you look right above you will see the 'M', train and face which were all made for Montana. He loves circles so I had to do the circles around his initial. That face is supposed to be the Iron Giant and Montana would have me draw it all the time on his papers and chalkboard. He is still in the scribbling everywhere stage but finally started to draw the Iron Giant the other week. He would draw it really huge. After seeing this post of Michelle's(look at the bottom of her post), I got the idea to take one of his gajillion drawings of the robot and resize it on the computer and then make a rubberstamp of his own drawing. So below is his little version of the Iron Giant, which by the way is a great little movie and I can't believe that it has already been 9 years since it was released. Montana is 3 and loves it and can do the scenes along with the movie, lol.

Edited: Michelle mentioned the 'perfect mini-circle trick'. I made my solid mini circles with a japanese screw punch. You only want to push it in about 1/8 of an inch. Just enough to give you a good outline of the circle. Then you can come from the outside of the circle with your carving tool up to the outline you just made and the pieces will pop out around the circle to give you a perfect solid circle shape. That is how i made my circles. If you have those round metal mini tins you can use the bottom or lid in the same manner to make a perfect solid circle. Even older cookie cutters that have the sharp edges would work by pushing them into your stamp material. (I think cookie cutters now are a little more rounded and not as sharp.) So anything that you can find that has a sharp outline that you can press into the block would work in getting a perfect outlined solid image. Hope all that made sense :o)