2019 #9 Arty Wood Blocks: Recycling Day! with ELB by Lucy Edmondson

2019 Topic 9: Arty Wood Blocks

I am rather partial to a little row of houses, particularly wooden ones. In fact, one of the few decor items I brought with us from New Zealand when we moved to the UK 18 years ago (bearing in mind we literally moved with 6 suitcases, so space was tight) is a small row of delicately painted wooden houses. They still sit in our bathroom to this day. Lucy has added colour and texture to hers and plenty of other lovely little touches too! ~ Leandra

Hi everyone, it's Lucy from Lucy's True Colours with you here today, with a post using recycled wood blocks to make a row of arty houses, using my favourite Lin Brown Eclectica stamps.

I think most of us have found that the old style wooden block rubber stamps take up a great deal of space - imagine if our whole stash was wood mounted now, our ceilings would collapse! Having said that, I was lucky enough to be given a bag of wooden blocks when my friend unmounted her older stamps a while ago, and there is something rather lovely about these pieces of solid wood. So I was very delighted to have this theme pop up and have a chance to use them. To remove the stamps and labels simply pop them in the microwave. To remove any remaining tackiness, you can buy sticky stuff remover very cheaply on e bay and you can also sand any residue away.

If your wood still needs any prepping, you can give it a couple of coats of white gesso to ensure any colours you add stay true. 

To start off, I covered tissue paper with a huge selection of leaf and abstract stamps from Lin Brown Eclectica ELB 29, ELB 30, ELB 31, ELB 33, and ELB 34.

I covered my three house blocks with the tissue and also a large piece to act as a plinth (no, this wasn't a ginormous rubber stamp block but an off cut from my husband's new woodworking hobby which I hope will prove useful in the future!).

I used a wash of translucent Fresco Finish Acrylic Paints, Hey Pesto, Autumn Fire, Tango, Mustard Pickle, and Chartreuse, dabbing in areas with a tissue whilst it was still wet, to give some white patches. 

For the house blocks I used the addition of Beach Hut for some contrast with the base. I then dry brushed the houses with Snowflake.

I wanted some little mounds of earth for my flowers to grow out of either side of the doors so I used Lin's stencil PS025 with some Grungepaste and once dry, painted the soil with Fresco Chocolate Pudding.

For the windows I used Tim Holtz's Fragments. I had intended to use patterned paper behind them to look like wallpaper but then decided to just paint some cardstock with Mustard Pickle to give the impression of light as you walk past the houses.

As part of my recycling theme, I used the protective corners from a delivery of frames as my rooves. I had some old fashioned wooden pegs from clearing out Mum's house which I thought would be perfect chimneys which I treated in the same way as the houses and then pushed through a hole in the cardboard. But my favourite part was covering the cardboard with hessian to make a thatched roof! As I liked them so much and the houses were quite busy, I left them plain. The other roof had a chimney made from two pieces of dowel, and I covered it with canvas to which I had used my transfer technique to apply Chatsworth paper, and then used Lin's stencil PS005 with Grungepaste mixed with Mustard Pickle.

I used JoFY's stencil PS008 with Grungepaste and Tango and Mustard Pickle and made doors from shrink plastic from Hot Picks HP1509 and HP1601.

I then had some fun decorating the base of the houses with shrink plastic flowers made from ELB 01 ELB 02 and ELB 03.

I had such fun with this relaxing and colourful project, and my love of creating started to come back as I felt myself getting lost in the 'making' for the first time in a while. I didn't really encounter any challenges along the way, apart from a moment of doubt when my husband came into the room and said, 'I thought you were making houses?' ! I hope if you have any wooden stamps left you will consider making something with the blocks, as you can still, of course, use the stamps afterwards - and it means you can use them with the many stamp positioning tools now available, so that's a good excuse!

Blog: Lucy's True Colours

Twitter: CraftyLuce