handmade stamps: easier than you might think!

I began making handmade stamps in order to make the designs for my Etsy cards more personal. I wanted the artwork to represent my hand all the way through. At first, I thought it might be too complicated. Wandering through my local PaperSource store, I found a little kit with the pink rubber material, a carving tool, and paper for transferring your drawing. I asked one of the women who worked at the store if she'd ever tried them. "Yes!" she said, "and it was much easier than I thought it would be."

She was right. I found the easiest way to go is to make simple shapes that you can repeat and overlap to make more complicated images. For example, the heart and the two more triangular flower shapes have proved very versatile. If you are confident of your drawing skills, or if you regularly "draw" with scissors in your collage art or scrapbooking, jumping right in with the carving tool is easy. If you want to see a pattern on the block when you are carving, you can draw your pattern on tracing paper, and then press it against the carving block, and rub. The drawing will transfer to the rubber, and you can carve along the lines. Wear goggles or glasses, and keep your fingers out of the path of the tool -- it's sharp!

Drawing it first also means that you will see the final result. The drawing will reverse onto the block, and the final stamp will reverse back to your original drawing.

Eventually, I began gluing the rubber to wooden blocks, using an all-purpose glue for rubber and wood. For a couple, I made images for the backs of the blocks. It's very helpful, but takes a bit of trial and error to get lined up properly.