Friday, March 29, 2013

Create Fabric Design with Original Polymer Clay Stamps

Printed Fabric
 A while back I created polymer stamps made with Sculpey Original White Clay because it is quickly malleable with often less than a minute of hand kneading, forms easily, bakes uniformly and is long lasting. I first formed the clay and applied it to a block of wood.  A brayer was used to flatten the surface of the clay and then the unit was put into the oven for the prescribed time on the polymer clay directions.  Since the oven is set at a rather low temperature, the wood was not compromised by the heat. The original intent was to use these on paper but the results were less than optimal.  Today I used a sponge tool to dab fabric screen printing ink onto the stamps and applied them to a piece of fabric that was laid on a padded surface.  The results were rather successful.

Here are the stamps that I made and used.
Group of Stamps
Floral Stamp #1
Vine Stamp
Star and Moon
Leaf Stamp
When applying the ink with a sponge, care needed to be taken not to get ink on the mounting block because that would have also printed and would have detracted from the design.  You can see that this happened on the first two printings of the flower on the bottom row.

Hint #1:  Make the polymer stamp thicker so that it stands farther away from the mounting block and will eliminate the need for a super light touch when applying paint or ink.

Hint #2:  Deeply inscribed lines make for an enhanced printed image.

Now that I know that the stamps work with fabric, these images will probably appear somewhere in my future fiber art works.






5 comments:

  1. a great idea I need to try....thanks for sharing

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  2. Replies
    1. Thanks for commenting, Linda. This week I may try my hand at making larger stamps from polymer clay. I shared your link to the article on sizing photos for social media with another group I belong to and everyone was thrilled with this information. Thanks, again, for the info.

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  3. Very nice idea. Will have to give it a try myself. thanks Mary BEth

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