My favorite time of year has come and gone, but during those few weeks of holiday cheer, I was crafting away on DIY Christmas presents for family, friends, and coworkers. Nate and I are for sure homebodies--we are perfectly content spending evenings and weekends at home without leaving the house and eating home-cooked meals three times a day.
Yet, on the first weekend of December, we decided to go out on a limb and take a day trip out to San Francisco. At Fort Mason, we stumbled upon a holiday craft fair full of local vendors selling their artisan products. One vendor was selling kraft notebooks embossed with custom travel stamps. I looked up at Nate and said, "Hey, I could totally do this too." And from that trip, a sketch of a San Francisco Victorian house was born into a stamp, and in turn, became fifteen-some custom kraft notebooks. I guess it's good to get out once in a while and feel inspired, right?
The kraft notebooks were very affordable and bought on
Amazon. Although not shown here, each notebook was personalized with a name stamped below the row of houses.
My light tracer has become one of my favorite tools. I use it to outline, sketch, and reiterate. First I drew the first draft in pencil, then ink and then transferred it onto Photoshop to clean up and enhance the drawing.
I have to give another plug to my go-to stamp store, Berkeley Stamp. It's a very small local stamp store in Downtown Berkeley. I have ordered numerous custom stamps there (as have my 'clients') and they have really nice people working there.
From powder to raised ink!
Stamping the kraft notebooks took a lot of trial and error (and frustration... Nate can account for the stamping tantrum I had one night). I had to figure out a working methodology of how to align the stamp so that it was straight and center on the cover, how to get the right amount of ink onto a notebook without it bleeding all over the place and achieving thin crisp lines, and how to emboss the stamp without the notebook cover curling.
I'm thinking next time I will tackle the Boston brownstone.