Undefined - carving your own stamps!!!

My first initial reaction to this was "oh my, not sure if I'd be up for this challenge". But when I saw my fellow demonstrators carve their creations at the Convention, I figured! it cannot be THAT bad.

I didn't get to try them at the Convention, as the carving station had some crazy line-ups. So I ended up ordering the carving tools, but didn't have the time (read: courage) to test them out.

Well actually I was doing some research and trying to find some ideas and images to use - I can be a crafter, but I'm not good at drawing!!

So I figured I'd do a car, a Finnish saunavihta (birch tree branches, which we use in the Sauna to whip ourselves - yes, I know that sounds mid-eval and cruel, but it really is not - the branches have still leaves on :-)

So here is my take on the saunavihta 

You can see at the top left the inspiration printed out. Too bad it actually was too large, so I did end up drawing my own vihta (that would be the blue image at the bottom right (on paper). Then I traced it on parchment paper! as the regular paper was drying the ink too fast, so I didn't get to transfer the image on the rubber, but from parchment paper it worked perfectly.

Once the carving was done, I stamped the image on the back of the woodblock with Staz'On ink (tried the blue ink pen, but it smudges my fingers when I used the stamp, so I switched to Staz'On.

And then finally on the little post-it note, is my final image (gives you an idea of the real size)

What do you think? Ready to give this a try??