Stars and Stripes Wall Art using recycled and vintage stamps
Stars and Stripes Wall Art Using Recycled and Vintage Stamps
This Stars and Stripes Wall Art was made using vintage and recycled stamps, PVA glue (modge podge) and a truck load of patience. It was one of the first wall art projects I made a few years ago, and it involved sifting through thousands and thousands of vintage stamps to find the right colours. I bought them as a couple of job lots on ebay.Its fairly self explanatory, so instructions are minimal.
I drew the lines in pencil, and then just glue stick repeat times a thousand to make the stripes and the blue background for the stars.
For the yellow / gold stars, I drew star shapes on a piece of paper, and stuck the yellow stars on top until the drawing was fully covered. Once the stars were dry, I cut out the same star shape with a craft knife, to get nice crisp edges on the stars. the whole star is then sued in one piece. onto the canvas.
Once all the stars were in place, I painted a black border round the outside edge of my canvas. Because the stamps aren’t always a perfect straight line, my edge wasn’t as crisp as I would have liked it. If I did a project like this again, I would paint the edges first including a small overlap onto the edge of the canvas. This will cover an imperfections.
This is one of those projects that is extremely therapeutic. My kids liked looking through all the stamps to find their favourites. So many are mini works of art. There were so many of the red white and yellow based ones. There were far fewer of the white ones (I guess because they don’t stand out as much on a white envelope).
To fill in some of the blanks, I took some of the ones that weren’t quite light enough, scanned them on the computer, and manually lightened them. Cheating I know, but it gave me the effect without buying 20,000 more packets of stamps!
This has been moved around a few times in the house, but is currently hung in a nook of our kitchen / TV room. Whenever we have friends for dinner, they always stop and have a look at the stamps.
Now just need to decide what to do with the thousands of non red white and blue stamps that hit the reject pile! If anyone wants a little package, leave a comment, and email me, I will try and send you some.
After seeing this on IG, I just had to come over and check it out properly. It IS very cool, and I can see how it was therapeutic, but oh my gosh- that’s a lot of stamps! It’s a very fun project though!
Carin that is so sweet of you. I made it quite a while back (before blogging and Instagram took up all my spare time). I think I managed to glue my way through a box set or two on DVD. Have a great weekend.
Its fairly self explanatory, so instructions are minimal.
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After seeing this on IG, I just had to come over and check it out properly. It IS very cool, and I can see how it was therapeutic, but oh my gosh- that’s a lot of stamps! It’s a very fun project though!
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Carin that is so sweet of you. I made it quite a while back (before blogging and Instagram took up all my spare time). I think I managed to glue my way through a box set or two on DVD. Have a great weekend.
Diana x