Monster Love Sprouts.

When I moved to Singapore, I was changing my lifestyle completely. Not only was I moving to a new country, but I was changing into a full time teaching artist. 

For the better part of the last 15 years, I had been juggling 3 - 4 part time jobs adding up to one full time job while working in my studio for the remainder of the time. More times than not, these positions were extremely fulfilling, just not enough to pay the bills. Ever. Even when I would log close to 70 or 80 hours a week. Minimum wage just doesn't cut it. 

So when I moved to Singapore, one of the things I wanted to do more than anything else in the world was enjoy my newly found weekends. (I didn't have weekends previously: Saturdays and Sundays were just more work-for-other-people days.) And I wanted to enjoy them by doing things: making things, meeting people, learning new skills.

So I was really happy to find things like Handmade Movement, meetup, and Monster Gallery to keep me busy. It's invigorating to learn new techniques and exciting to meet new people in the process. 

Following my cooking class on Saturday, I attended a stamp making workshop at Monster Gallery. This time the workshop was led by a lovely lady named Jo from Love Sprouts.

We received all of the tools you see above, plus the example template that we used in class.

Jo was very thorough in her instruction and she created the most elaborate stamping designs I have ever seen . . . Absolutely gorgeous work!

We started each stamp by drawing it on tracing paper and transferring it to our dual-colored stamping pad. (The yellow is carved away making it easier to see your design.)

When we began the carving process, we started on the outside of the design. Next we carved the window, door, and the stripes on the roof. Strangely it resembles foam in the picture below . . . (It's not.)

Progressively each stamp we made became more and more challenging to create. First we did the house, then the cloud, and finally the hot air balloon before jumping into cutting out phrases and letters. 

Our final objective was to create a stamp to fill in part of the balloon. You can see below where I have filled in one of my test balloon prints with blue and my other test print with green.

Again I have to mention that this was the most in-depth stamp making workshop I have ever attended. I admire the precision that some of my classmates had. (My work was a bit more clunky.) And it began raining about halfway through the workshop which was sort of unknowingly lulling me to sleep. All-in-all I think the words in the picture below perfectly describe my experience! 

Up next with Monster? A movie screening of Tony Takitani by Jun Ichikawa on Thursday (February 21) and the first-ever Handmade Movement creative sharing session on Saturday (February 23). This is our first event as a family of creatives: I was asked to join their creative team a few weeks ago and happily accepted! More on this soon . . .

To continued excitement around every creative corner in Singapore!