DIY - Making Stamps

On Tuesday night I randomly came up with a DIY project I wanted to start and I’ve been thinking about it since. I decided I wanted to make personalized stamped fabric to use for cushions when we get dining chairs. This DIY goes beyond just stamping and sewing though, I am making the actual stamps! No one will have the same fabric as me!!!

After checking various posts on Pinterest for how other people went about this process, I decided what I would do.

My initial test run involved a box cutter and a rubber eraser. It turned out well considering how tiny my surface was. I made a tiny flower on the end of a pencil and a whale on one end of my eraser.

As simple and mess free as the eraser was, it isn’t big enough for the pattern I wanted to create. My initial plan was to use a piece of mold-able clay and carve into that.

To start I collected up all my tools and found a mobile surface to work on so I could lay on the floor while carving.

I used: 1 box cutter for carving

A painting knife for smoothing and pulling away excess clay

1 pairing knife to cut the piece of clay off the block

Firm mold-able clay from the dollar store

            Print outs of the image I want - for use as a stencil

With everything ready to go I got to it. I cut out my printed image and traced around it onto the clay with my box cutter.

From there I slowly cut deeper and removed all the excess from around my lobster shape, because it’s fairly detailed and not that big this step took quite a while.

When the stamp took its final shape all that was left was to smooth out the surface and remove any unwanted imperfections.

I had wanted to try out the stamp on paper using an ordinary stamp pad but the one I had was too small. I tried brushing the ink on as well but it dried too quickly to make a nice transfer. When I get to the stage of actually stamping my fabric I will be using liquid fabric dye so it should be much simpler then. But I’ll make another post for that part when I get to it!

Happy Stamping!