YSM 6/20/11 - STAMPS!

OK, I told all of our listeners this the other night - I had ZERO desire to do this. I'm not a stamper. I don't make cards, probably because I don't SAVE cards (that's right, people, if you send me a card it ends up in the trash) and the only stamping I do is underlayers for paintings. OK, I will confess that Kelly has an amazingly impressive stamp collection and I have been known to stamp a whole bunch of mermaids and make them into bookmarks and stuff like that. Anyway, I didn't wanna do this. I stressed about it ALL week, which defeats the purpose of YSM in the first place. But you should hear some of the things I've talked Kelly and Ajae into doing. So, they both really wanted to carve stamps and it was my turn to go along with what they wanted to do for once!

When I was pretty sure I couldn't carve stamps, I thought "Aha! I'll just do what me & Suzi learned at CHA with the marshmallows!" So I took a bunch of them and got started. All you do is heat it up with your heat tool (don't hold the marshmallow, the heat tool is TOO HOT and you'll burn yourself) until you can see the surface start to change. It gets a little shiny, but DON'T let it get to the "toasted marshmallow" point - that's too toasty. When the surface changes, mash something into it.

Heart brad:

Wedding cake brad:

This is a stamp of a stamp, I mashed it onto my text stamp:

The bat symbol (I mashed it on Batman's chest):

Then I was SO chicken to do this that Ajae, Kelly, and I had to be on skype together. This is the speedball rubber I started with, it's 3 inches by 4 inches.

This is a girl I drew in my journal in PEN - there was no erasing, no lining up of the features, just an imperfect girl. I printed her picture on plain old #20 paper, then traced over the lines with a regular #2 mechanical pencil.

To transfer her onto the rubber, I just put the paper face down and burnished it with my iPhone 3G. No special tools, nothing difficult.

Then I carved:

Stamped:

Carved some more:

And now I LOVE her!!

Here is a link to the tool and to the rubber. I got my tools and blocks and marshmallows at Michael's, and I had to ask where all of them were! If you've ever wanted to make your own stamps, now is the time!!