Carve December 2021 In Review

We are almost a week out from the first of December, and it means that Carve December is quickly approaching. It seems like the perfect opportunity to revisit the product of Carve December in 2021.

Carve December is hosted by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer @balzerdesigns on Instagram. Every day, you carve a stamp based on a prompt and share it on Instagram. It's an excellent way for the stamp carving community to gather and carve together. It's kind of funny how different everyone's brains work, and it really shows when you look back at what everyone's made. Last year was the first year I participated, and I'm looking forward to playing again this year. You can see last year's prompts by clicking on this link. The images below are my final product in order of the day for 2021.

My favorite of the carves would probably be day 9's carve: Jovial. It's a rather simple image, but it fits the prompt well. It's a beautiful flower and every time I look at it, I feel happy. I'd say that a close second would be day 7's carve: Lonely. I wouldn't say that this image is the best fitting for the prompt, but I decided to carve it and it proved to be a challenge. I had never carved "water" before and getting the reflection right was difficult for me.

The carve with the most positive response would definitely be day 25's carve: Unique. The image is complex and elegant, and it came out really well. I am VERY happy with this image and wish I had better ways of repurposing it.

The coolest artistic technique in the carving would probably be day 19's carve: Loud. It's definitely not the best of the carves or the cleanest, but the way the wolves' fur changes from being positive-on-negative to negative-on-positive is really cool. it's not something I had tried before, but it is something I would do again. It definitely adds a lot of texture to the image.

Something I was asked by my family was: "How did you manage to carve 31 stamps in the busiest month of the year?" Honestly, the challenge is to carve a stamp a day, but I would carve on the weekends and when I had time off work to get ahead of the game. It also helped that I had December 2nd - December 7th off as I had my wisdom teeth removed. It provided lots of time to just carve and not worry about work. I know carving ahead defeats part of the purpose of the challenge, but I'm happy I did it because when I feel burnt out or stressed about something, I likely will give up and not finish the project.

The coolest medium for color goes to day 1's carve: Lovely. This was a pretty cool technique that I'm going to have to make a separate post about, but put simply, I painted liquid watercolors on crumpled plastic wrap, then pushed the image face down on top of it. It adds the perfect eroded effect that I was looking for and simultaneously gives me a perfect ombre for the colors, which I love.

Now I have 31 stamps, that I love, but I only keep them in a box. It's kind of sad, because I know there are letterboxers that would love to find them, but it feels wrong breaking them up into different series or individual boxes. I had wanted to go to a larger state park (for me, that's Lake Anna State Park) and hide them on a longer trail. Even that has proved to be a large task than I had prepared for, apparently. The prints in the images below have found a home in a 10"x20" picture frame that hangs in my office at work. I will do the same thing with the images from Carve December 2022, because I really like the conversation starter piece.

I'm going to probably post a once-a-week Carve December 2022 update on this blog, but if you're interested in following day-by-day, here is a link to my Letterboxing Instagram account, where I will be posting daily.

Blog Maintenance: This will likely be my last post until after Thanksgiving so I will be moving on to a Christmas theme later this week. Please don't be shocked when my fall theme turns into Christmas! :)