Leave Your Mark

Hello, everyone! This week, I have a fun craft for all you scrapbookers and stationery lovers out there–stamps! Though, this isn’t solely for those crafters because the best and easiest way to quickly add a personal, handmade touch to something is to use a stamp! But isn’t making your own stamp hard?  Not even a little bit!  In fact, you could probably do it with stuff you already have lying around your house–ya know, like an eraser and a utility knife!

For this project, I used a couple of our Cheap Joe’s Extra Soft Erasers and my trusty X-Acto Gripster Knife.  The great thing about these erasers is that they come 12 to a pack for only $7.39–that’s only 61 cents per eraser, and you could feasibly get 4 stamps out of a single eraser!  Now tell me where you can buy a personalized stamp for 15 cents?

To start, I cut one of the erasers in half.  And let me tell you, cutting into these things is like slicing a tomato with a Ginsu Knife! Then I drew my designs onto them with just a Faber-Castell 2B graphite pencil.

The next–and essentially last–step was to diligently cut around my design. Again, these erasers are the perfect softness for cutting fine details, but sturdy enough to hold up to the reuse that stamps go through.

Tip: It’s a great idea to cut your corners down because those are usually the parts that get unwanted ink on them and ruin the effect of your stamp.

For the stamping, I just used my Speedball Hard Rubber Brayer to roll out some Golden High Flow Acrylics (as used in this post about block printing and this one from last week where I used to paint a pair of shoes).

In this case, the High Flows worked just as well, if not better, than ink because they had just enough viscosity to keep them from dripping off the sides of the stamp or just evaporating, but not so much that they clumped up on the stamp. The brayer was extremely helpful because it applied an even layer of paint to the stamp, without getting it on the parts I don’t want paint on!

As an alternative to the brayer, you could just very carefully (and with a tiny brush) paint the stamp itself–but that’s really tedious and not nearly as reliable.

Regardless, they both work like a charm!

Now these little stamps are perfect for decorating envelopes…

…and matching stationary!

You could even create your own monograms!

Here, I designed a little H for my last name.

Then carved it out! Tip: It’s important to remember if you do make words or letter to do them backward because stamps mirror whatever is on them.  Thankfully, in my case, H’s are symmetrical!

Easy as that!  Now I can use this on anything I want to say is from me or was made by me–like gift tags or even signing a work of art!

The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination!