Using Stamped Quilt Blocks to Create Interest

I'm a little bit addicted to carving stamps and lino plates, it's a lot of fun, and I create a lot of work based on those stamps. So like this little guy, this is a stamp of a bird standing on a limb and I got to go in there and do all kinds of wonderful hand stitching, but this was done with intent. I knew this was what this little piece was going to be. I'm intrigued by how we can possibly save a not-so-interesting piece. I don't know about you, but there are times when I think I've got this great idea, I do it and then I look at it and go, ehh, that's not enough, ugh.

So can we save a piece by stamping some images on it, stamping some motifs on it? This was the first one I tried. I thought that just doing this little piece with these plain blocks and then quilting these circles on it by hand would be enough, that it would be interesting enough, intriguing enough and I got it done and I kept thinking, oh, the next circle will make it more interesting and I got done and I thought, no, this is not very interesting, so I thought, oh well, maybe I should go in and double up my quilting and put another quilting line in there and I didn't have time to do any more hand quilting. So I knew I had some fun little stamps that I had purchased and I thought, well you know what, what have I got to lose? It's not very interesting anyway.

I'm gonna grab those stamps and some black ink because I had this black inner border, I knew I was gonna be binding in black, and started stamping. Now stamping on a finished piece, that's risky, because if your stamp doesn't turn out and you have something icky, then you might not be happy. I have to admit, my very first stamp that I did, I'm not sure which one it was, but it was one of these lighter ones that had some areas that didn't stamp very well. It might've been this one, the corner's kinda gone, and I just started to panic, and went ah, well, just repeat it. It didn't turn out very well, make sure you have a couple that don't turn out very well, then it looks like you did it on purpose.

So I have some that are lighter and some that are darker, meaning some that have more ink on them and some that have less ink on them. Whenever you're stamping a motif, it usually takes a couple of stamps before it gets really nice, it's kinda like that first pancake isn't very good, the first imprint usually isn't very good either, so print on some paper towel first and kind of get your stamp with a little bit of ink built up on it or paint built up on it and it's gonna give you a better print, but if something doesn't go right, repeat that thing again and then it looks like it was purposeful. But I think the stamping really helped this piece. Now you'd think I'd learn my lesson. A bunch of squares sewn together isn't all that interesting.

Well, I decided to do it again on a much larger scale and so I grabbed all my favorite hand dyes and cut eight-inch squares out of them or seven-inch squares, or whatever these are, and thought, well if I make a really irregular edge, that will be enough to make the piece interesting. And of course when I got done, I just looked at it and went, well either you're gonna have to quilt something interesting in every single one of those squares in some other color and make it really nice quilting, or something else, applique, something, again, I wasn't willing to work that hard. So I went and cut a stamp, and so this is the stamp that I cut and the only color I could think of using is black because otherwise I have every color here and I stamped every single block, and now I love it. I can't wait to quilt it, because it tells me how to quilt it, I already know exactly how to quilt each block, I get to quilt them all the same, they all have the same print on them. The colors are I think different enough that that adds the interest to it.

The stamp is moving in different directions so the swirl is moving in different directions, its entry I guess you would call it is in different places, so that adds some interest, and I think now once I get this quilted, it's gonna be a really cool piece. This final one, again, I was thinking to myself, this is a baby quilt for somebody, and I was thinking that you know, I would just quilt something interesting in there and that would be enough, and these big purple things, she likes purple, mom, but I know it's a boy and I thought, well you know, I like to make baby quilts that are gonna last for a long time, so this is, you know, a decent size, and I want whoever has it to be able to watch TV with it when he's six, whatever, not just a baby kind of theme, so I went ahead and put in leaves. So I took a stamp that I already had, commercial stamps that I already had, and put those on there. Now this is a long piece of stamp here, so I actually had to mask out this area. I put the leaf on first and I put that leaf right across the seam line on some of these, so this has a seam line and a couple others do too.

I think because I was running out of fabric and had to create a bigger piece of fabric. But anyway, these stamps really perked up this piece, and they made these violets not stick out like sore thumbs like they were doing before because I repeated colors from the piece. So my vote is yes, you can take a piece that's somewhat boring and make it much more interesting by adding a stamp design.