After I printed my potato stamp, I kept laughing at my work for a while, and my laughter has my mother’s attention. Then, she saw that and laughed about it for the entire afternoon…I’m the only child, so I’m always in need of all kinds of housework and see myself as a handyman. Therefore, before I put my hands on this little task, I imagined it would not take me more than 10 minutes, and I would have a fine stamp to print anywhere confidently. But now, I’m even embarrassed to post it here.
Here are some observations from my prints: “emoji”:
- Obviously, when I designed the stamp, I didn’t remember to write it from right to left nor to reverse all letters. I’ve noticed if it’s only for simple letters, the process of shifting words would be tricky.
- I spent 28 minutes to get the prints done, which was a lot longer than I thought due to the following reasons:
- 1. Curving for letters is not as easy as images. Among letters of my choice, I found “i” appeared to be the easiest, and “e” was the most challenging letter. Then I rejoiced for not choosing a word that includes the letter”f” nor “g”. Since the crafting process was tedious and didn’t involve in any thinking, I was easily distracted to plan for tomorrow.
- 2. When I finally have my stamp ready, I realized the waterproof marker couldn’t color the potato. Since I don’t have fabric paint as shown in the instruction video, I had to try every single pen in my inventory.
- Since potato is fresh and full of juice, the paper I printed became crumpled.
- Comparing two copies, I have noticed that my letter “e” changed: the left upper side of “e” has a variation! Then I checked the stamp and found there was a little piece of potato attaching loosely and reshaped the print with an extra dot beside “e.” I’m not sure if that is the result of my careless curving or my stamp, or only because my potato stamp is that fragile.
This task is thought-provoking for me since I can not stop imagining what if I need to print a press or law with 100 words? First, I need to select my carving tools, colouring tools, and stamp material( definitely not 100 potatoes). Second, I have to reverse every word carefully then double-check. Third, I need to prepare five pieces of paper for just 1 copy. Ideally, after 10 hours of tedious crafting (6 mins work per word), will I have printed fine copies of this brief writing? The answer is still a no! Since I am not a skilled carver, the print will be blurry… After this task, I am feeling blessed to born at a time with the mechanization of writing that knowledge, thoughts, and literature can be easily shared and spread at minimum efforts. I appreciate for the laughters the task bought to me and my mother in such a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I also appreciate the task requires explicitly for a 5-letter work instead of any word of our choice. 🙂 Thank you!
Hi Yi,
This was interesting to read and very different from what I decided to do. I’m glad you took the time and risk to do the potato printing over the manual scripts. The concept of potato printing is something I have never heard of before before this weeks task, but I could see how difficult and tedious it would be and how forgetting simple things such as writing the word backwards is something that could be easily forgotten . Also when I was doing some research on what potato printing was, I mainly saw it being used for transferring images or text to personal items such as bags or t-shirts. It would be interesting to do your potato print on a white cotton t-shirt versus the paper to see if it would be less ‘soggy’ and whether or not it would be more bold!