Great announcement! my new tutorial is now in sale!

After days of hard work, I'm very glad to announce the new tutorial of Memi The Rainbow with which you can learn how to hand carve cute and unique rubber stamps!

This is a tutorial of so much as 35 pages, composed by a first part, in which I list all the tools you need and all the steps, supplied with photos, that will lead you to be able to create your hand-carved rubber stamps, and a second one fulfilled by a lot of amazing patterns. In the second part I drew a lot of cute templates inspired to my world and to the things that I love, which you can use as ideas for your hand-carved rubber stamps.

Here you will find so much as 28 pages stuffed with drawings divided into various themes, from the monuments of Paris (the town where I live and that I love), to its food and its particularities... but you will also find pictures of everything that I find pretty as mushrooms, hedgehog, butterflies, bunnies and much more ... all represented through a simple and basic style suitable for becoming a good pattern on which to create fantastic stamps. I am sure that these drawings will be useful both to those who relate to this technique for the first time as a basis on which to practice and to learn, and to those more experienced as a source of original ideas to create truly unique stamps.

I’m sure that, with a little practice, you will be able to create perfect stamps. At that time your imagination will have no more brakes and will be free to create everything!

My tutorial is now available on my etsy shop!!! check it out, it is an e-book, I will send you a pdf file with no shipping fees!

I hope you have fun with my tutorial!

A very special Teru Bōzu against the season rain

Teru-teru-bōzu, teru bozu

Do make tomorrow a sunny day

Like the sky in a dream sometime

If it's sunny I'll give you a golden bell

Teru-teru-bōzu, teru bozu

Do make tomorrow a sunny day

If you make my wish come true

We'll drink lots of sweet rice wine

Teru-teru-bōzu, teru bozu

Do make tomorrow a sunny day

But if it's cloudy and you are crying

Then I shall snip your head off

So recite a famous Japanese nursery rhyme, whose protagonist is just the Teru Bōzu, a little traditional doll of Japanese folklore entirely handmade with the white paper or cloth, and whose purpose is to serve as an amulet to prevent rainy days and invoke the good weather.

Here in Paris, during last days weather was not sunny at all, with a lot of clouds and some rain showers... so to get sun I has no choice but to put aside all scepticism and to to turn me too to use this doll... here it is my newborn Teru Bōzu; it has still to be tested to see if its power to scare to death Amefushi - the spirit of rain - is real, but I must admit that even if it fails to fulfil this duty I could never snip its head off as the nursery rhyme says at the end... it is really too cute to be beheaded!

For the moment I am just hanging at the window and even though the weather outside is still cloudy, I’m glad to have at home a new sweet friend who, at worst, will keep me company in these dull rainy days!

If you also want to build your Teru Bōzu you have only cover a spherical object which will become the head of your doll (you can use for example a ping pong or tennis ball or some simple cotton) with a square of cloth or white paper, to be fixed with a ribbon. Then, you can draw eyes, nose and mouth.

If you want to adopt the Teru Bōzu of Memi the Rainbow, you can buy it here.

New entries on my etsy shop!

What I find brillant in making rubber stamp by myself is not only the chance to turn any image into a template following my personal taste, but also and above all the fact to be able to customize later all my creations with just created stamps! Indeed, although there are a lot of cute rubber stamps already made on sale, in that case the stamp decides to what to be put on. How many times it happened to buy stamps that, despite the pretty pictures, I could not use where I wanted because they were either too big or too small. Hand carved rubber stamps, on the contrary, let imagination totally free to create, because in this case is the rubber stamp to fit to all our needs: I can decide the topic of drawing and its dimensions... and I assure you that is really funny!

These days I created some rubber stamps as this one that reproduces the famous kewpie doll. I love this Japanese doll, I hope to have them done justice...

With my new stamp, I wanted to create immediately a colored brooch in natural cotton and felt that you can find here on sale.

And here's other two hand carved stamps...

And voilà the respective brooches, one called "last cold days", to say good bye to the winter as springtime is coming....on sale here

And one featuring wild boars that, in spite of their rough apparence, I've always found very sweet! Available and here.

Finally, five small rubber stamps made expressly to decorate the original buttons with fabric...on sale here.

Cheburashka!

Here's a new friend: Cheburashka! He's only relatively new because is born in 1966 from the mind of the Russian writer Eduard Uspenskij during the times of Soviet Union. I can not avoid to be surprised by the fact that in this country, frequently considered as austere and dour, it was possible that such a sweetness was created! Concerning the cuteness, I guess that Cheburashka puts at risk the primacy of Helly Kitty; it's sufficient just to hear his song to melt my heart! Moreover, this cartoon is not dull at all and, even though only four episode were made, each character is very well developed and has an authentic "human" being!! But who's this cute little friend?According to the original story, he's a strange little animal with a bear-like body and large round ears, unknown to science but he's probably from the tropical forest: he's arrived in Soviet Union travelling into a crate of oranges in which he's get accidentally and , after having eaten his fill, fallen asleep. Arrived to a greengrocery in Russia, the salesman found him into the crate and took him out sitting him on a table. However, this strange animal could not sit because of his paws were numb after the long time spent a-squat, and he tumbled down from the table onto the chair and than from the chair onto the floor. For this reason the salesman called him "Cheburashka" as "cheburakhnulsya" (чебурахнулся) is a Russian quite archaic colloquialism that means to "tumble" in English. Cheburashka is always accompanied by his friend Gena, a crocodile-looking stern, wise, sometimes sad but never resigned and always hoping for the future despite the thousands of adversity impersonated by a spiteful old woman. Gena always wears a hat and a red coat, walks on his hind legs, works in the city zoo as a crocodile indeed, and he's able to play an accordion with which accompanies Cheburashka playing his poignant lyrics full of meaning.Well, I think I've fallen in love with this tale, so I wanted to recreate its characters in a set of felt brooches and in some cute hand carved rubber stamps with which I've promptly made a letter-set dedicated to Cheburashka...

I hope you like them too!