String Notes

I was asked earlier this winter about escarbuncle rubber stamps, since I already do escarbuncle stickers and t-shirts. I said I thought I could do stamps, but would need to experiment with the technology a bit.

It took me a couple of tries to get a good escarbuncle. Then I discovered that water-based inks will not work with the clear stamp material – they bead up on the surface. So I went out to Michael’s, and picked up the acrylic block and the ink pad.

The clear stamp material will adhere to the acrylic block without any adhesive as long as both are clean, and can be easily peeled off for storage. The ink pad I got claimed to be for use with clear rubber stamps. Other brands should also work – stamping is wildly popular, and there’s lots of information online about supplies for use with clear stamps.

You don’t need an acrylic block, just something completely flat to mount the stamp on. The block is convenient because you can see through it to get the stamp in just the right spot.

The stamp material is thin, so it’s easy to get ink on the block itself and smear the stamp impression. I wiped off the corners before stamping. The impression is cleaner if there’s something a bit soft underneath the paper. I expect with a bit more experimenting it would be possible to get a better impression, but I don’t have any experience with rubber stamps. The internet suggests that the image quality improves after the stamp is used for a while.

These aren’t listed in the catalog yet, but will be about $2 for the size of stamp shown here, and more for larger ones, of course. I don’t think I can cut an escarbuncle any smaller and still get a clean cut, but I can make stamps up to 6 inches.

I can also do custom rubber stamps, stickers, and heat-press t-shirt vinyl. There may be a setup fee for converting your design into the correct format, but after that I will keep your file and can cut your design in any material at any size with no additional fee. It’s just that it is a time-consuming process to convert many kinds of image files into the correct format. If you can provide me with a clean vector file, there will be no setup fee.