My funky airmail envelopes!

Last night I was looking at a tutorial on creativebug.com that was taught by Christine Schmidt on making airmail stamps. I bought Christine's book Print Workshop when it came out a couple of years ago. I also own a lot of her great rubber stamps. Here are my handmade rubber-stamps inspired by the tutorial on Creativebug.

                                                                               

I bought a eraser stamp at Daiso for $1.50. You can buy other carving blocks
but I wanted to try using inexpensive materials for this project and it worked just fine.
 The cutting tools are Speedball linoleum cutters.

                                                                           

These are the two sets of stamps I carved mounted with rubber cement on blocks of wood.

This is where I did my version of the airmail stamps. I decided I wanted to have two colors so I carved my first stamp with three marks on it leaving enough SPACE in between for the single stamp.  The second stamp was a single mark. This is an easy way to get two colors on the envelope.

I used the "three mark" stamp with the blue ink pad trying to get close to the edge of the envelope.

The next step is to use  the single airmail "mark" stamp with a red ink pad and stamp
in between the blue "marks".

Here are some of the finished stamped envelopes with my new stamps.

                                                                             
 I used craft paper envelopes and used an airmail stamp I found at raft.net. I didn't trust myself to cut out letters! I am not accurate enough or skilled enough for the linoleum cutters. As you can see I made two sets of stamps. The first one the airmail "marks" are wider and the second one I made was skinnier. I plan to make a third more accurate set but as usual  when I see an idea and I want to make it FAST and now. My version is pretty funky but definitely one of a kind envelopes for mail art!

Here is the great book by Christine Schmidt called Print Workshop showing
all sorts of hand printing techniques including making rubber stamps.