Every summer we head to Mt. Desert Island, Maine and spend two weeks camping there. We have been going since 1997. Blue Hill is a funky town about 45 minutes from Mt. Desert, filled with artists, hippies, and musicians living alongside upscale summer residents and a fancy restaurant or two. Years ago, there was a cool shop there called Asian World Imports, it was in the basement of a house. The owner loved to travel to Tibet and Nepal to work with local artisans. He would bring back treasures to sell and always had amazing stories to tell about his adventures there.
Underneath the selves of handcrafted paper books, to the left of the extensive buddah collection, he had baskets full of wood blocks. Black wood with carved decorations that had a slightly oily smell. I bought two blocks the first year and added a few more blocks to my collection the second year we visited. Every year I added a few more- I looked forward to checking in on Jeff and seeing what treasures he found. He often mentioned that if I had a design he would arrange to have it carved for me...but that is not what I wanted. I like working with the old designs of antique stamps.
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| My first stamps |
I started with stamps the way I start a lot of things, timidly. Just a few little pieces to use in small areas, mostly around mug rims- cute....
One year there were no smaller blocks, so I picked out a couple of larger ones and began to work with imprinting larger pieces. Then he sold the business.
I found more wood blocks in Bar Harbor, on the main street in a shop that sells unfinished wood items. They sell larger blocks and those blocks would need a larger space to work with. That's when I decided to make trivets and soap dishes- a (slightly) larger canvas to play with.
LOVE !!
This weekend my studio table looked like this:
So much freakin' FUN!
and that's not all of them ~
I plan to do a lot more with these and only wish I could spend more time in the studio...but that is another blog post.
Have a good week!
