Making Your Own Custom Rubber Stamps

Everyone loves sending and receiving greeting cards for holidays and special occasions. Even more special is receiving a custom-made greeting card with personalized stamps and stickers. Such cards go beyond simple greetings to become treasured keepsakes. You don't have to be the least bit creative or artistic to create your own greeting cards, ornaments, gift bags, gift wrapping, or decorations. The craft of rubber stamping requires very little specialty equipment and you can make spectacular designs with a bare minimum of knowledge. And there are tons of useful instruction booklets and websites to help you quickly become an experienced stamp artist. All you need to get started is one or more rubber stamps, paper or cardboard, ink, and maybe markers, stickers, glitter, ribbons, or paints.

Many crafts and artistic pursuits take years of education and experience to master, but rubber stamping can make you an artist almost immediately. There are thousands of different stamps available for making your own personally decorated items, and new stamps and stamp collections are available all the time. However, one of the most creative and expressive things you can do to expand your stamp collection in a unique way is to make your own stamps.

Most art supply stores carry art gum erasers, which are inexpensive large cubes or rectangles of rubber usually used to erase pencil, charcoal, or crayon. You can carve an art gum eraser into any shape, because they are soft and pliable, and they can be easily carved using a craft knife, exacto knife, or any sharp blade. You can either carve a freeform shape or a specific pattern or design. Perhaps a company logo, a school insignia, or a family crest, if you're feeling adventurous. However, to learn the basics about carving, you may want to start out with just a flower, animal, food, or geometric shape. Or you can just put blade to rubber and start carving, and see what you end up with. Beginning your carving adventures with a freeform shape will make it easier for you to get the feel of working with the knife and rubber before you move on to other designs or other stamping materials.

Art gum erasers, because they are used to erase pencil, are often crumbly and soft, which might make them a little difficult to work with if you are creating a design that is very precise or intricate. If you want to do something elaborate, you may want to upgrade to a firmer eraser or even a linoleum carving block to get more precise results. But for beginning stamp carvers, art gum erasers are ideal, primarily because they are low cost and easy to carve.

To begin carving, make two small cuts into the flat side of the gum eraser to form the tip of a triangle. Use the tip of the knife to remove pieces of the eraser to make a beginning "hole" to start your design with. Continue slicing off small pieces of your design around the place where you began, all the way out to the edges of the flat side of the eraser. Alternatively, you can start at the edge and cut inward to create the design. Do your best to keep each cut at about the same depth, and be sure to make them deep enough so that when you press the stamp onto the ink pad, ink will not be deposited into the cut-out sections of the stamp.

An important tip to remember when carving a stamp from an eraser is to cut slightly at an angle downward so that the evacuated part of the rubber is a valley-shaped depression rather than a block-shaped cutout. This provides more stability beneath the flat surface, so that you will be able to press down evenly across the surface of the stamp and not result in an imperfect or blurry stamped image. Be conservative as you cut; remember that it's easy to continue taking away from a design, but it's impossible to replace any eraser surface after it is cut.

It is very important to remember that the image you will create with the stamp will be made by the rubber you are leaving intact as you carve - not by what you're carving away. Also, the image you carve will be the reverse image of what you're carving into the flat surface of the stamp. So if your intent is to make a stamp of a person's name, a monogram, or anything that has to be oriented in a particular way, you should carve the stamp design backward, as it would appear if you held the final design up to a mirror.

When you are satisfied with your design, gently brush or blow the rubber crumbs away. Art gum erasers can be somewhat delicate, especially if your design is intricate or your carving job is the least bit ragged, so be gentle when you remove the crumbs. Be sure you've gotten all the tiny pieces out of the carved-out areas so they do not fall onto your ink pad, or worse, fall onto your design as you're stamping.

Start with something simple and pretty, and then as you gain experience and confidence, you can easily move on to something more specific or elaborate. Before you know it, you'll have your own collection of stamps that are uniquely yours, so you can create unique personalized designs that your friends and family will treasure for years to come.