Block Craft Printed Cards

It's simple and fun to make an assortment of greeting cards using carved wooden printing blocks.

This post is a review of products I received free of charge and contains my honest review. A few weeks ago, I talked about the bloggers workshop I attended at the Stitching, Sewing and Hobbycraft Show at the NEC Birmingham. I mentioned the fab goody bag we bloggers were given and how many exciting goodies were in there.  The lovely people at The Arty Craft Place had popped a wooden block printing starter kit into the goody bag. It contained a flower (or is it a sun?) carved wooden block, orange fabric paint, a piece of cotton fabric to practice on, a sponge, a foam mat and instructions.

Well, I've been playing and today I have a few fun greeting cards ideas to share that I been able to make. I tried the block printing on the fabric and onto card (the folks at the Arty Crafty Place say it works on either) I used textured card as well as smooth, which gave some interesting results. I think I like the results on the fabric best, it was really easy to get a good print every time.

To make it washable you just iron it on the reverse, which I did do even though of course I'm not expecting anyone to wash these cards!   The instruction advise you to always use the foam mat under whatever you are printing on. I found when I printed onto card the first time I pressed too hard and the card creased a little. So I tried without the foam.

No - don't do that! Just don't press too hard and the wooden blocks actually print beautifully.  The prints onto the textured card were a little mottled as I would expect, I kind of like that look.
I trimmed the prints on the card and turned them into a selection of simple cards, just by stamping a greeting on some and mounting them using foam pads onto mini card blanks.

I experimented a bit with embellishing onto the prints, one with a few dots and doodles:

And one with some sequins, which I just glued on with PVA tacky glue:

After that I thought it might be fun to add some embroidery embellishment to the fabric prints.

I tried a few different ideas, all very simple stitches, it didn't seem to need anything complicated. I just used regular DMC stranded embroidery thread and experimented with using 1 and 2 strands.

Then I just cut the fabric into squares with the fabric prints centrally and stitched them onto scraps of card the same size on the sewing machine. That way it was easy to mount the prints onto the card blanks as before. 

Ta Dah!

This little matching gift tag was so easy. I just cut a basic tag shape, printed the design using the wooden printing block, punched a hole and added a little matching pom pom trim. 

This gift tag is on the textured card, you can see what I meant earlier about that giving a more mottled look.

I've loved playing with this carved wooden printing block, even with just one block and one colour of paint you can get different looks. I've got some more ideas of how I'm going to use this block next - it's not the last you've seen of it I'm sure! The Arty Craft Place have a blog with more ideas too if you want to check it out.