Tuesday, May 8, 2012

My First--and Second--Hand-Carved Stamp

For the longest time I've wanted to make a hand-carved rubber stamp; I've seen them on Craftster ever since I became a member of that site, and I think they are cool!  I bought a set of linoleum-cutting tools about a year ago, and several months ago I picked up two blocks of "Speedy-Carve".


The only thing missing was an ink pad, and that fell into my hands when I attended Fork and Talk in Little Rock, Arkansas, (hosted by Craft Gossip and sponsored by EK Success Brands).  One of the items in the huge bag of products I received that day was this big black ink pad.  Perfect! With all the materials ready to go, I finally had the motivation to give it a try.

Here is an in-progress shot of my SECOND carved stamp; you can see the tool I used at the top of the picture.  I traced the heart and wings from a plastic template I already had made (I use it to make sewn hearts).

And below you can see the finished products:  my first two carved stamps!  Yay!  The one at the top of the picture is actually the first one I made.  I tried to carve the words in the center...and realized what a newbie I was, when I stamped it the first time and the words were BACKWARDS!  AARGGG!  So I just carved them off the stamp and resovled to try again later.  I finished the second stamp last night, in about an hour.


To get the words onto the stamp, I printed them off the computer, then drew over them (on the right side of the paper) with pencil.  Then I put the words face-down in the center of the heart and traced each letter with a pen (I thought it would give firmer pressure than a pencil) to transfer the pencil marks onto the stamp.  It worked great!  (Although I must say, the directions that came with the stamp did NOT work great:  "Use slightly warm iron to transfer images:  pencil drawn, newsprint, freshly printed ink-jet and laser-print images."  My freshly printed ink-jet letters did not transfer at all with the slightly warm iron.)

So, now that I have these awesome new stamps, what am I going to do with them?  I tried stamping the one with words onto a card; hmmm, looks okay, but kind of plain and boring.  So I tried something else.



Oh, yeah, that's better--I glued some randomly-cut pieces of bright paper to the card, then stamped on top of them:



I made a lot of cards!

And I stamped a envelope for each card using the stamp without words.  I intend to use these as inserts with swap packages and etsy sales, and I will write the recipient's name inside the heart on the envelope.  (Hey, if you join a swap I'm in, maybe that will be YOUR name!)

I'm so happy with how this stamp came out; I especially like the all the little lines in the background that make it look hand-made.  The carving was actually much easier than I expected; it just takes patience and a steady hand.

I've ordered more Speedy-Carve...now I just need another good idea...

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Ahhhhh!
These are sooo cool!
A see very many hand made stamps on your future, Leslie, and these are perfect kickoffs.
Now all of us at craftster will look forward to seeing these on our swap packages!

wendiek said...

They are great Leslie! Nice design!

You could also use different kinds of colours ink: just rub only that part of you stamp you want in that colour and stamp. Clean your stamp and rub in a different part of the stamp and stamp.
The only tricky part is to be stamping in the exact same spot!
Or use two stamps for one design.

Hope that makes sense, as a student we had to create our own stamps, that's how I know!

wendiek said...

Yikes, I see a spelling mistake... Don't pay attention to it :-)