plumrose



Wednesday, 7 December 2011

Homemade Blocks for Unmounted Stamps.

Today I received my Frosted Friends stamp set from Artistic Outpost . I love them. But I didn't realize they would come on one sheet of rubber. Uncut and unmounted. Even tho the title did say unmounted, I just thought it came like the clear and cling stamps do. I didn't order any materials to build them into mounted stamps so I asked the girls on the Tim Holtz yahoo groups for some advice. They are good quality stamps, so I thought I would try make something of my own from the help over at ATT.  Here's a short tutorial: ( my very first)

To replace the wooden block that I should have,  I cut 2 pieces of chipboard for each stamp, out of this box I had saved. It was good and sturdy and rather heavy. The chipboard was corrugated, so I was careful that none of it was squished or it would make everything uneven. Or so I figure anyways.



The 2 pieces cut to be just a little larger than the stamp itself, and glued them together. This just gave the stamp a little more of a solid backing, plus gave my fingers a little more to hold onto while stamping.



Next I stamped the image with Archival ink onto the white side -for placement reference while stamping.






 Once that was dry,  I white glued some fun foam to my block opposite the side of the stamped image. The foam was from the dollar shop and quite thin.



After each step along the way, I gave it a good flat press with one of my acrylic blocks.






I ran some double sided tape across the backside of the stamp.





I was careful to place it in the exact same spot as the stamped image. (but on the opposite side) That takes some eyeballing and lining up before pressing the stamp onto the block.
 This photo is trying to show the stamp and the image lined up.



So there you have it. It took some time to do all of them. And I used materials I had on hand rather than waiting for another shipment to arrive. But now that that tuckered me all out....I guess I'll do all my planned stamping with them tomorrow. :0 So I'll see how it goes, and maybe one day order the proper stuff for mounting. But they do stamp perfectly and I'm happy with the results.



No comments:

Post a Comment