Designs by Ryn

How flattered was I when I was approached by Ryn Tanaka of Ontario, Canada to be a guest designer for her beautiful line of Rubber Stamps "Designs by Ryn" . She had found a link to my blog from my friend in the US, Linda Cain who also happens to be one of Ryn's previous guest designers. Linda had done a beautiful job with Ryn's stamps and I felt that I should choose different stamps to the ones Linda chose. I opted for some of Ryn's fabulous botanical images and immediately had two project ideas in my head. One involving fabric and the other metal. It was just a case of waiting for the lovely postman to arrive with the stamps!! I didn't have to wait long, just a week and they were here.....all the way from Canada....I have to wait longer than that sometimes for items ordered here in the UK!!!

I knew when I first laid eyes on these images that they had the potential for more than just plain stamping with ink. As the images have very crisp, clear lines with good spacing, they were just crying out to be embellished with beads.

Here's what I did.

Step 1. I stamped the image of the Begonia SKU CM-F2 on a fine weave, cotton fabric with Rangers Jet Black Archival ink. Heat set with my heat gun before spritzing the whole thing with water from a Mini Mister. I watered down some Pumpkin Soup Fresco Finish paint and allowed it to run off my paint brush in the centre of the flower. Don't forget, I'm making three flowers here so I did everything x3!!!

Step2. I mixed a little bit of Brown Shed Fresco with the Pumpkin soup to make a lovely shade of orange and after spritzing my fabric with water again, I was able to let the orange bleed into the first colour.

Step3. I repeated the process with my third colour, Claret, allowing the paint to bleed over the outside lines of the image.

Step 4. Once the whole flower had been painted, I repeated the process with a second layer of paint to make the colour more intense, after all, a lot of water had been used here which is great for blending colours together but of course it does dilute the colour somewhat!

Step 5.Once all the paint was completely dry, I cut another piece of cotton and a piece of wadding which were both slightly bigger than the image and held them together with a few pins.

Step 6. This is the part where you do a spot of hand sewing!!! I stitched over all the bold lines of the image with black thread and chose a pretty, sparkly gold thread for the more delicate lines, stitching through all three layers at the same time. Then it's time to dig into your bead box and stitch a few seed beads to the centres of your flowers. When all the stitching is complete, trim away the excess fabric, leaving about 0.5cm border.

Step 7. Final step for the flowers is to take a small paintbrush and paint all the white edges with a little bit of the Claret paint.

I took a photo of the stamp and the finished flower so that you can see just how deeply etched the stamps are, this makes it so much easier for printing perfect images each and every time, especially when working on surfaces other than card or paper. The other bonus with these stamps is that thney come mounted on EZ Mount and trimmed closely so that they are ready to use.

Step 8. I used Ryn's Leafy Branch SKU CM-F15 to stamp my background on some more cotton fabric, just as I did for the flowers, although this time I didn't spritz with water as I wanted to paint the leaves green without the paint bleeding so I simply used Hey Pesto and a little bit of Pumpkin Soup to give the leaves a variegated look. You can see from the photograph that the images of the Leafy Branch do actually overlap and look a little unsightly in the centre but that really isn't a problem as the finished flowers will hide this.

When the leaves were all painted, I heat set with my heat gun before painting the background with Beach Hut Fresco.

Step 9. Here's a close up shot so that you can see that I added a little bit of stencilling around the edges of the fabric to make it a little more interesting. Once this was done, a few rows of untidy stitching on the sewing machine completed the look.

I mounted my fabric on a simply painted wooden block and created the begonia label with the wet fabric/paint technique as a finishing touch.

I had so much fun working with these stamps, please hop on over to Ryn's website to take a look at all the wonderful designs she has. You can also read all about Ryn's background here which I found fascinating.

I still have the metal idea whizzing around my little brain and I hope to put that idea into practice some time next week so stop by again if you are in need of a little inspiration.