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Making Your Own Rubber Stamps

Rubber stamps have have always been a fun thing for me to work, and I've been doing rubber stamps for a long time back, and then in the late eighties, I used to publish a print scene of boingboing print version of boingboing dot the website that that I'm involved with now, and one of the things I would do for our subscribers is when I would send them a copy of the scene. I would do rubber stamps all over the the envelope, and it was just a fun way to kind of personalize the things that I sent them so rubber stamp civically, what you do is you can either buy designs from off the shelf from stores you can buy them online there's companies that you can upload leinart, too, and they'll make rubber stamps for you. But there's also a way to make rubber stamps easily at home and that's. What we're going to work on this time is this to show you how to make kool rubber stamps that you can use for a really wide variety of of uses afterwards, you can make greeting cards with them, you can make gi...

ft wrap, you can do any kind of artwork, there are even rubber stamp inks that will work on close so you can do t shirt designs. And then you kind of said it or fix it with an iron and then you khun run it through the washing machine and the rubber stamp design will stay on the shirt and not fade away so you could there's really a lot of stuff you can do with this process so we will get started with that do you guys have all of your your stuff mold support at this time? Okay cool and more okay, we'll go ahead and finish up and I'll just continue tio talk aboutthe rubber stamps but we want one thing I wanted to talk about with rubber stamping was how to cut your blocks of wood and we had a miter box and so we'll grab that and I'll explain that to you. But first of all, what we can talk about is this kind of foam kraft paper that will be using for the rubber stamps you can see we have a variety of colors here and it really doesn't matter what color it is. We're not concerned about the color because the color is not going to come off the ink that we're using is is the color comes from the stamp pad but that we just happened have a variety of colors because that's the way they're sold and they're typically you typically by sheets of this kind of foam kraft paper and they come in a bunch of different colors and it's sticky back you can see and so that's and he's back and it's really easy to use this stuff and it turns out it wasn't really intended for rubber stamps but it ends up being a great way to make rubber stamps and and traditionally, as you know, rubber stamps come on, wood blocks they the rubber materials here and then you have a wood block and so I just wanted to briefly talk about a great tool that's inexpensive that everyone who is interested in making should should get it's called the miter box you can get one for probably about ten dollars very inexpensive including the saw including a solve especially made for the miter box and in the miter box itself and you can see here that it it has these the's little slits in them and those air for cutting different angles it gets rusty really quick that yeah, if I ever wanted to rein in los angeles, I just leave my tools outside and yeah, you're welcome and so so the miter box it's gotta it's also got a lip here and so you can push it against your table like this. If you want a permanent solution, you can just take some screws and drill it on just uh just screw it into your work table if you ever wouldn't work table and then you have something that doesn't slip around so what you do to get a nice square cut with a miter box? That's that's what you did write a purpose of a minor boxes to get either square or angled cuts. You put your your your wood in here, and typically there are little these holes here. You can put some pegs that our camp and you can turn them. Tighten the piece of wood against here. This this particular one? The pigs aren't around, but you can still do it. You just put your miter box in here on you just saw. And the yes, and as you can see, the slit keeps me from, like being accidentally turning it at a bad angle or something. So we'll have a nice straight. And then you can see we have a nice square edge there that needs a little bit of sand paperwork, but other than that it's great. So it's, a great tool to have inexpensive. You can use it for for thicker pieces of wood. It takes longer when you do it with the finger piece of wood, but I highly recommend having something like that and that's what we used to prep thea rubber stamp pieces that that, uh, we see here these different bases here, and so we have several different bases of different sizes and shapes and, uh like I said, once you cut them, what you will want to do is sand off the rough edges. We have sandpaper change, you want to attack those edges a little bit with sandpaper and smooth it out and afterwards way have two different grits of sandpaper you could start out with the rougher it quickly clean it up and then used to finance for this project. We're not we're not overly concerned with the wood way. What we really want is so that you don't get splinters that's really the only reason we're standing up it's not like this is going to be part of your like a picture frame him or something like that. Okay, so we have some different way have some different kinds of stamp pads here, and so you should keep in mind the size of the stamp pad when you make your rubber stamps, you can have ah, rubber stamp is larger than the stampede, but you just have to, like code the rubber stamped by moving it around on the pad until it's completely absorbed, so we'll do it in different ways, and then we have these many stamp pads from maybe we could do some little decorative stamps too, so the next step is to cut out patterns that you want into your craft foam, and like I said, it doesn't really matter what thea color is of of the phone because you're going to get ink on it if you have white you'll be able to see what color incas on there it would be cool toe have some of those small cookie cutter show that like you could make really small that's a really good idea you could use the cookie cutter just to get that push it in there and get the shape and then kind of with the scissors so jane, why don't you cut out some shapes but the scissors and you guys go ahead and do the same and leave the sticky back on it and then once you like the shape you can fit it on tio onto these little slices of wood from my experience what I what I found is that when you cut the stamps out ofthe based under drawing it's a little hard to control and get it exactly it's better to just kind of be free form and cut it out the way you want thea other thing that I should mention is if you're going to do letters so you want to do an alphabet you need to do it so that it's reverse image because when you stamp it it's going to be a mirror image of whatever shape is that you draw and so one way to do that is that's what reminded me to use the paper side and take a sharpie and draw the letter the correct way and then when you and then you cut it on that side and then it will come out mirror image for you said that when you stamp it it will be the right orientation so for example if I were to do like the letter so if I were to do the letter f like that I would draw it that when you cut it and then attach it to the woodblock I'll do that after jane has done with her scissors their kids weird face okay genes so what you see what kind of surface do you want to put that on? I'm just thinking like that genes we're trying to figure out your stance that might actually be a good one for the should I should I cut that with the miter box so that you have a stamped its normal size that would be cool I'm gonna cut that with the miter box like stuff but we have that fear like style and you can go ahead and start doing another ship why thank you this usually would go quicker if I had the little pegs in here that that way that I hold it down then I have to make shorter strokes on my my cuts drawing you'll cough rough night did you find that easy to see them um pretty cool trick actually kind of tricky you have to have like it has to be moving all the time I'm kind of making the pattern for him and he's gonna end up popping it out of the like it doesn't go all the way through the paper saying let's, flip it over and they have to go on because those lines that go down to the other side of the paper but doesn't cut exactly like some parts which are open and then other parts which are not right that makes sense so maybe you can pop it out have you tried drawing it out first and then cutting it? Did that work or you think it's easier just to use the knife? Trump is just the easiest use life all right? You take care of that one next so we'll have to test out the drawing so I'm just trying out some different pattern ideas to give you an idea how you can use these stamps to make interesting patterns and one thing I learned when we made these at home wass you accidentally get like an accidental cut in it it's okay? Because when you stick it onto the wood it's gonna all piece together so like even if you accidentally cut it in half when you stuck it into when you stop when you stick it onto the wood you could put one half on than the other half right next to it to make sure our that's correct so don't worry if you accidentally cut it so what how are you guys doing with your uh that's something here they will say you can stack shape on there all right scorpios joining us online as she says she uses just the pencil to draw the image on that indentation is enough to create the stamp she doesn't ever ever cut anything out oh, the pencil itself will create the line you need if you use a shot but but what do you do with the extraneous material let's let's hear red scorpion tell us I was gonna have the ink on it that is interesting I'm making just kind of an abstract pattern here and you'll see with the effect is ringo so you can see I made it just a shape like this on duh we'll take some of our card card paper here and just apply it to this stamp pad can see here we're getting a nice color push it down here they'd exchange fish well that's cool no, you should make it like a rainbow. I could do that, but I'm just going tio show like kind of a potential give draft or something with just the pattern it could be a clothing pattern or so what I'm doing is I'm just getting the incontinent rotating this stamp one hundred eighty degrees every time I put it down you can see that you can get some new patterns thiss way and I could change the colors if I wanted alternate colors and have kind of a grid pattern that way so that that would be cool as a t shirt design or something or the greeting card that looks good change um so then another fun thing you can do is kind of is masking um so let me show you what I mean by that we'll make kind of a zigzag pattern here now my foot red scorpion is saying is she uses almost as a reverse there isn't any way she draws on that invitation so you've basically negative why she's not going to upload an image of that into our gallery so please everybody who's working with this apartment we'd love to see your work to go to the course makes you can load your the images to the guaranteed love to see your rubber stamps and what you're creating here be great fun that's so cool I love that I'm going to give that a try so now I'm going to show you a little bit of how uh masking works so this way you you put your paper down um in a pattern and then when you apply the rubber stamp, of course what happens is that it uh it will not it'll just it'll just show up on this bottom part here and so let me just make sure I have my orientation right like that and so what I'm doing is I'm just masking away the part part of the paper so that it's not appearing, and then you can come with some interesting pattern effects that way, so that way you can get really complex by doing this and end up with some really cool looking patterns, so you can see now we have these little triangles of blank and that's uh, where we can try putting jane's fish. Did you use this one? Okay, add some fish in there, but that precious, and then if you want to switch colors around on the same stamp on what I recommend is that you get a little bit of white, like a baby wipe or something, just wipe it down and then clean off the stamp like that, and that will keep your colors from getting muddy, and it will keep your stamp pad even more importantly, from getting mixed up. You want to keep your stamp pad nice and clean and clean off the wood part, too, because any part that touches the stamp pad is going that the colors they're going to mix. Ok, I'm going to just dry it off like that we'll give it another color, thea, what color is this one here, kind of a blue one let's see how blue on blue looks the great thing about this is if you if you ever make a stamp you don't like and you put it on the wood but then you realize you don't like it you can peel the phone log and just put on anyone for sure so there you can see we uh different color fish with no mixing that looks good were you the one thing I wanted to do is cut up my cut out the f is sure you help what I mean by the reverse I really want to try that pencil technique j k o that's a cool and yes doing in panic yeah you know I think you could just get some neat pattern designs like swirls and things like that so how does a pencil oh let's give it a try and see well the ten does ten work um yeah, no way we can use that pen I think sure okay, so you can see that the f here is uh in reverse but when I get out think should get a good amount of income there and then I push it down it's uh it's oriented the proper way like that so just that's just something to keep in mind when you do letters that you're going to get the mirror image of whatever the stamp looks like when you're looking at the stamp itself so here you see the way that it looks I'm going to quickly do this this kind of pencil pattern technique that is too tempting not to not to try so uh I'll take a piece here let's see here so I think it is oh that's really cool. So jane made a cool checkerboard pattern that you could see on there that looks really great. It looks like fish food let's see if we can do like a spiral shape I'm just pressing into the foam and it's leaving an impression on during this quickly so it's not really good need but I just want to check the effect out and see if it how it looks so I will give it and get up here this one's a little larger than in pat's I have just make sure I get it nicely coded if you have markers to you can actually just take the markers and draw on have you done that before? Jane actually has because at home in japan I got this stent and it's my name in japanese but, um I didn't have any income pads and I was too lazy to go into the garage get some so I just drew on it with a marker and does work on yes it day I mean it was a little more faint then it worked that's all that matters look, it does work do you see that? Yeah, it has almost like a tunnel effect that one that's great. So that is a really cool tip so you get the kind of that reverse look and you could have I could even see lettering or writing you kind of signs messages that is a cool idea. I wish they would have had that in my book that's already scorpius saying she said it also wants the indentation has made it doesn't ever spring best pop pop permanent compresses for good that is really cool yeah, I mean you very much for that suggestion that's great. So how are you guys doing down here? You see good in bad I made something too intricate and I couldn't kind of diets you know what? Leave a fingernail for prying up I couldn't fly up the sticky stuff on it so I'm going to let me try that. Yeah, you know, I think the skull with you the skull with the energy level letter came out fine. Okay is great good that's good in the k actually because it's uh it's kind of symmetrical you you don't need to worry about your miriam you just flip it upside down. How about you, bob and cal? We did. We did a two sided um uh the bird and then the inversion that's really cool of it and then, um it kind of looks like this that looks great you have grass at the bottom yeah very nicest and I might add are my colors you're using that account you're clearly having some great stamping from this and what with what did you just stand for us? Is that a shark it's so well think away well ok this is the way jury animal that is awesome trick you're drawing it than just cutting out free hand yeah it's kind of tricky following your lines but I can't really good and you could use that grasses seaweed if you wanted to know where the aresco let's go so so I hope that this issue would you like the variety of things you can do with this and again like I said, you're not limited to just paper with this you can do it on cloth and you use the special rubber stamp ink that's made for fabric just look online you stamp it on then you fix it with an iron I think you put a sheet of some kind of special paper over it just ironed it down the color fixes onto it and then you have a great design on your clothing and president makes your wipes kifle oh yeah look at the colorful five two and like I said greeting cards give draft you could I could imagine someone even doing this on their wall if they really wanted to take that kind ever need patterns on their wall so really this is a great way to quickly make beautiful prince very inexpensively.