Eagle's Nest

In honor of the eagles we were thrilled to see on the Olympic Peninsula, I offer my Eagle's Nest carve. It was one of the many, many temporary traditional letterboxes at the memorable We Live & Breathe Letterboxing event last September.

This larger stamp, actual size 2.75" x 3.25", was an image I found online. However, I played around with the various sizes of lines (notice the tree lines are much thinner than the eagle and nest outlines), as well as positive and negative carving (in the nest). I like the balance of the dark, heavy feel in the opposing corners, as well.

You may notice that in quite a few of my stamps I add a border. There is a couple of reasons for this. One is to better define the image I am featuring, as so many times I 'zoom' in on a particular piece of an image, instead of carving the whole. This allows me to make a stamp smaller or to concentrate on the important part of the image. The second reason is to give stability to the stamp. The border enables even and clean stamping since it has consistent support all around, as opposed to rocking to the weakest side and causing stray 'side marks' on your stamped image.