Have a seat

We're double dippers when it comes to Thanksgiving.  Our first feed, ahem, meal is this Saturday.  Hettie and I got to work on some place cards for the occasion.

Do you want to make some too?  Okay, here is how...

You are going to use thin styrofoam to make a printing block.  I happened upon sheets of printing foam at the art store today, and dreamed up this plan as I milled about the store.  But... the good news is... you can use a meat tray!  Now, we don't eat meat in our house, so I bought the sheet at the store, but my friend Carrie is now on retainer to save me her meat trays for future projects.  She's a bit wary of the raw meat juice and craft project tango, but I'm going with a good scrubbing with soap and water and we'll be good. 

The gist is get yourself some thin foam either from your garbage/recycling or from the art store. 

Mark off an area for your design on a scrap piece of white paper.  Kiddo then draws a turkey (or something else equally fabulous).  Can we just talk about that turkey?  Love it.  Especially the "turkey talons." 

Cut out the drawing and tape it on your foam.  Use a sharp instrument to trace over the drawing (I used a chopstick).  Peel off the paper and re-trace the image to get it nice and crisp with an even sharper tool (I used a kid's embroidery needle).  This could obviously be done by an older kid him or herself.

Use a brayer (more on this in a minute) to spread water-based printing ink or plain old paint on something nice and flat (like a cookie sheet).  We have a couple of brayers, but thanks to an-adult-male-in-my-house-who-shall-remain-unnamed-but-definitely-didn't-clean-off-the-paint-last-time-he-used-them, one of them is painted shut.  However, we discovered that a kid's plastic rolling pin from the playdough bin was a fantastic stand in for the second brayer you use (and maybe even for paint spreading?).

Place the block paint side down on tent folded pieces of brown paper bag and use a second brayer/rolling pin to firmly but gently roll over the block to help the image transfer well.  Bend the paper and the block away from each other and peel the block off. 

Repeat, repeat, repeat.  You can wash your block and brayer off and do multiple colors.

We wrote the names on separate strips for the look, but also so we could easily re-do mistakes without destroying a printed card.  My eldest might just have inherited a pinch of my perfectionist trait, poor girl.  Glue the names on and get ready to eat!

Comments

[mama ring]

i love the idea of using something free! i've been wanting to do block prints but didn't have anything to carve, but i should be more open minded. i probably have plenty of things that would work.

these turned out great!