Sunday, November 7, 2010

Making Our Own Rubber Stamps

We are carving erasers into rubber stamps, and then stamping all over the place!

Here are a few places I visited to educate myself before jumping in with the Sm'Arties:

Letterboxing Kids

Stamplovers Only

Ruthann's

Obsessively Stitching

Abigail's How-To


The Craft Junkie

Eraser Arts and Crafts Projects - This site has links to a BUNCH of other sites with little fun eraser-related projects. 


What we used:  Dollar Tree erasers!  We had some rectangular ones and these ovals.  The ovals are my favorites, because you can use the pretty oval outline.




I brought just a few tools for carving - Exacto knives, Stabilo carvers, and metal pencil ends (where I pull our the eraser), one still rounded; the others crunched into a gouge.  The Stabilo carvers are my favorite - what a difference! Since I only have 2 handles, I just wrapped the ends of the extra blades in Bandaids and we gouged away.


My intent was that the children just carve a bit on the first erasers, just to see how it felt, but they all started carving designs so fast I could not keep up!  Before I could talk of how to transfer designs and about mirror-imaging, little trees and stick-figures appeared!


And Jackson proudly showed off his "Jax" stamp.  Only thing is, he didn't realize that when you stamped it down...

...but then he got the hang of it.  In spite of seeing the lesson from the "Jax" stamp, other Sm'arties had trouble with the whole backwards-mirror image thing - mind-blowing!




I brought along some clipart of Florida images - a palm, and alligator, a sea turtle...



You can use a stamp pad or markers with rubber stamps.






I love the skateboard dude!

Shark attack!

Here is a palm I did, colored with markers, then stamped on a blue ink pad.  I love how it turned out in the oval










1 comment:

  1. I'll have to get that skateboard dude stamp from you tomorrow. I think it ended up in your bag.

    You must have forgotten to mention an older S'martie who also forgot about the whole backwards mirror-image problem as she was planning a design for one of her extra "I love you" erasers ;) That was the funniest thing ever!

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