Reviewed by
Mary
Craftiosity supplies a bimonthly craft kit which includes everything you need to make something lovely and useful with your own two hands. Past boxes have had a huge variety of projects, including a clock, a mobile, needle felting, and lots more. It’s a great way to try out lots of different techniques, and have something lovely at the end of it!
The Craftiosity box is always presented beautifully. I do like how the sticker says ‘and the adventure begins’ because creating something really is an adventure!
I was thrilled to see that this month the craft is making festive linocut stamps. Perfect for the Christmas season, you get everything you need to make your stamps, and also provided are a pack of blank Christmas cards and some cute gift tags to decorate!
Equipment includes a proper lino cutting tool, a sheet of soft link block, inkpads in red & green (festive again!) and templates to create your stamps.
I have vague memories of making linocuts back in school, and it was rather fun. For this one, you draw over the template and then place on the lino and draw over the back, transferring the pencil lines. Then you carefully carve out your shapes.
The instructions are very detailed, and there’s also a video if you like visual learning. The technique is a little tricky, but there’s also space on the lino to practice your technique. Plus the further you go along the easier it gets.
The lino is soft so it’s not hard to carve, but it’s quite time consuming carving all the shapes into relied! Also the tool is extremely sharp, you need to be careful.
But I was very pleased to see my pictures starting to take shape! And once you get in to the rhythm of carving, it’s very satisfying, especially as you do have to concentrate to make sure you don’t care anything you don’t want to!
Once you’ve carved all your little pictures, you cut them out and start playing with ink! You need to do some practice stamps first, not lease because you discover buts you hadn’t carved away properly around the edge! But then it also adds to a lovely rustic look.
As well as the ink pads, there’s also a gold pen that you can use for the sun and moon shapes. With four trees, two houses, and the moon and star you’ve got plenty of options to create little decorative scenes on your cards and gift tags.
By Evelyn 
