Itsumo Mawaru

I love carving stamps! Here are pictures of some of my self-carved stamps.

My first two were the star and heart,these were made using a regular white eraser and an x-acto knife.

The mushroom was my third stamp, also made with the same tools.

Bear Butters, pictured here, was done using actual carving rubber and carving tools, and the result is a much crisper and more detailed image. He wasn’t too hard to carve, took around 2.5 hours or so. He’s about 1.5 inches tall. I decided to make the stamp an outline vs. a negative image so that I can color the bear suit with pencil crayons, thus allowing me to make zany suits. I still have a bit more chiseling to do, mostly around the edges where the ink is holding on. And there are a few flaws in the linework, an obvious one being with his eye. But all in all it’s a cute stamp, and I had a lot of fun making it!

To the left is a picture of a teeny card I made using my new Bear Butters stamp. I gave him a sad face.

The card opens, and has the message “I’m a bad bear” written inside. FYI, this is Butters, a character from South Park. In this episode Paris Hilton is trying to buy Butters to act as her new pet named “Mr Bigglesworth”, and she dresses him up like a bear. A hilarious episode, and Butters looks so damn cute dressed up as a bear, I couldn’t resist making him into my stamp!

I’m not very happy with my old Orange layout anymore. It has way too many broken HTML functions (not my fault!), and displays things in a very weird and not pleasant way.

So I’ll be looking for a new theme, one that’s a bit more open. Perhaps one that’s more flexible over rigid. It’s sad that my tweaks on this theme were ultimately pointless, but at least I’m exercising my skills.

Edit: I’ve found a nice new theme! It’s live right now. I’ll still have to beat it into submission, but at least the Tweets and Flickr stream are working! Yay!

I’m totally taken by stamp carving.

I’m experimenting with both erasers and actual carving rubber. I’ve made a few teeny designs so far, and am finishing up a bird whose design came with the carving kit.

Then I’m gonna make me a Bear Butters stamp! Hells yeah!

I’ll stamp out some of my hand made stamps tonight and post an image here.

I’m starting to bake up a batch of Banana Crumb Muffins, using my Mini Loaves pan instead of a muffin tin. I’ll be taking pictures as I go and I’ll post a summary on the Bread Blog… whose name I should really change!

Edit: Well, that was fun. I made the muffin loaves, but I totally didn’t take ANY pictures. That’s what happens when you have a food processor, the whole cooking thing takes way less time, which means less time for photos in between. Oh well, I’ll have to plan this one out better next time! I’ll review the muffin loaves when I get home… yeah I forgot to even bring one in for work! Sigh!!

So I went to the hospital yesterday morning to have them look at my right wrist. It had started hurting the day before, with intense nerve pain shooting in my hand when I flexed it a certain way.

The wait was a tolerable length, made easier by having my DS and laptop for entertainment. Two rounds of sudoku and twenty pages through an e-book and I was getting x-rays taken.

The good news is there’s no serious injury, and apparently I have beautiful bones! I guess drinking milk has that effect. Just some swollen cartilage putting pressure on a nerve.

The bad news is that my injury was most likely caused by yoga. So I’m taking a week off yoga to let my wrist get better, then I’ll start up again ensuring my wrist doesn’t overextend. It’s all those downward-facing-dog and cobra poses. Apparently there’s a wedge foam block you can get that helps with wrist alignment. I’ll head over to a fitness store in the coming month to take a peek.