Today I'd like to send a 21-candy-cane salute out to my nephew whose birthday it is. So to create an army of the little stripey dudes, I had to create a means of mass-production. The solution: candy cane stamps.
I know I was proposing Sculpey for president, but what I really want is for Speedycut to win the primary balloting and ask Sculpey to be its running mate. Speedycut/Sculpey is my dream ticket. Speedycut is a soft rubbery block-printing material that can be carved quickly and easily even with linocut blades that date back to grade school. If you sketch your design in soft pencil, you can rub it off onto the Speedycut block and it transfers like a dream. It is quite easy to get good handmade prints from Speedycut with printing inks, but it also does a pretty nice job with stamp pads. For this project I chose easy-to-use washable ink pads.
Here are the two stamps I used to make the gift wrap shown above. I first cut two blocks of equal size, and made a sketch of the design in pencil, also the size of the blocks. This sketch was my "key". I transferred it to both blocks, so that the elements of both blocks would align with each other when printed. I put the sketch face down on each block and rubbed over the back to transfer the design. Because it transferred as a mirror image of the original sketch, the final prints made from the blocks were mirrored yet again, printing the design in its original orientation.
I printed the green block first, since it left a nice square shape on which I could easily align the second, pink block. Of course, a single-color print would make very nice wrapping paper too, or a couple of shapes that could be printed in different colors to create new patterns. In addition to wrapping paper, this particular design lends itself nicely to gift tags. Kids: Do try this at home.
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