More Carving Homework

I am not dead. Nope, though today I feel a little foggy. I did a 4-day road trip to OH, MI and PA, got back about 11:15 pm Sunday night, and I'm a little weary today. I was smart enough to plan the day off from work, so I'm still in my jammies, and not planning on doing much other than going to bed on time.

However, I AM trying to catch up on my stamp carving homework.

I'm actually 4 classes behind on homework, though I've watched all the videos. Today I finished up the alphabet lesson and also did the woodcut stamp. Here's what I've made...

First, we were supposed to carve a whole alphabet, but I know me pretty well, and I'd never use it, but I appreciate the need for the lesson, so I just carved these:

You are looking at the numbers 1-0 and the letters for 'happy', 'rd', 'th' and 'nd'. I think (hope) that's all of them. This was my plan:

I'm not feeling the love. I don't use alphabets much, so I'm not heartbroken over this homework. I certainly learned a lot about carving, so there's that. :)

Then I jumped ahead to today's lesson: the wood-carved look. We were supposed to "miss" spots on purpose. THIS I can do. Here's my carved stamp:

The image stamped at the top right is my first pass at inking it - part of what we do to see where we are in the process. The stamped image to the left of that is one of my "are we there yet?" inkings. The stamp and image at the bottom are where I ended up. I chose to clean it up more in the middle and leave it distressed ("rustic") around the edges.

Here's the card I made with it:

I didn't like it until I used two colors to ink the image, and now I kinda love it a little. :D I used Ranger Distress Faded Jeans and Fired Brick. The paper is SU Not Quite Navy, and the sentiment (toomuchfun stamps) is one of the irreverent ones I got at the LSS a while ago. Oh, and I drew the flower image instead of using the one provided to us. I'm a total rebel.

Please ignore the disembodied flower tops. ;/ Julie mentions "the rustic people" in her videos, and suggests we probably carve too fast. Well, yeah, guilty. If I took more time and just focused, I'd do better, fer sure. But I'm kinda liking this rustic thing, ya know?  Unfortunately, the other two catch-up assignments I need to do don't lend themselves to "rustic", which is probably why I haven't started them yet. But I shall ... I shall ...

Okay, then, the laundry calls, and I have more homework and stampin' to do. Thanks for stopping by!