Vegetable Print Making

I'm obsessed with sending snail mail and putting together gifts for people. I'll post about the packages later, but I wanted to come up with cute way to wrap the packages. I wasn't sure if you are allowed to wrap packages to be sent via USPS and I didn't want the wrapping paper to tear in the mail so I decided that stamping the boxes would make them look a little more festive than just shipping out a plain box.

At first I was going to just buy a stamp, but stamps are really expensive and I am on a budget, especially since I had to pay to ship out all those packages. I decided I was going to be my crafty self and make a stamp out of potatoes. Of course the day I went to make the stamp the potatoes that were in our house for weeks had been thrown away the day before. My mom told me to use the acorn squash (because it too had been in our house for weeks). I was a little nervous that the squash was going to be too soft, but it was perfect.

I started off by cutting the top off so that it would be easier to handle. I then made the shape with a small knife and cut away the outer edges of the shape so that the tree was a 3D shape sticking up from the rest of the squash.

I then practiced stamping on newspaper to make sure it would actually work. I also tripped away more of the outer edge that was sticking out and leaving paint in places I didn't want it.