On Your Radar

Arts and Crafts, Creative Therapy After All December 13, 2009

I have been busy this evening making my Christmas cards. Or actually they’re not Christmas cards, they’re best-wishes-for-the-new-year cards. It has been a very long time since I sent cards this time of the year. So I thought in order to make up for it, I will send hand made ones this year.

When brainstorming what I was going to put on my cards and what materials I was going to use, I remembered how as a child we sometimes made stamps out of potatoes. We’d cut a shape out and then dip it in the paint and stamp it on paper. I thought it’d be fun to do, and I was right.

It wasn’t as easy as I remembered it though. The carving of the potato was easy enough. Aside from the fact that one of my stamps is a letter and I forgot to carve it in mirror image so that it would appear right on the card so I had to redo it. The stamping was less easy though.

Of course my cards are no children’s paintings and thus a little more precision is required, though the somewhat sloppy look gives it a cute edge. Instead of using the stamp as a stamp I had to carefully place the card on top of the stamp and carefully press it down before removing it even more carefully. And rather than dipping the stamp in the paint I had to carefully paste the paint onto the stamps leaving no paint around the edges. But I did manage to make glitter paint simply  by mixing acrylic paint with glitter dust and it looks really good.

The cards aren’t finished yet. But they already are a personal success. I say personal because even though there is no end result yet I think they’re going to be great. On top of that I enjoyed doing it so much I wondered why I don’t do it more often. So I guess maybe one of my new year’s resolution will be doing more arts and crafts seeing as how it makes me feel good about myself. Those are the things I need the most at the moment, things that make me feel good about myself.