I have a bin full of rubber stamps in my craft room. And sadly, some of them haven’t even been used. I bought them because they were so darn cute but had no idea what I was going to do with them. I know, not a smart shopper. But our friend, Melissa, may have just found the answer to my jumbled up bin of stamps and lack of inspiration.
She came to visit me the other day with a gigantic binder
tucked underneath her arm. I thought it must be her research for her doctoral dissertation but it turned out to be something much better! She had photographed her stamp collection (which is larger than the aisle you see at Michael’s) and printed out all of her stamps onto regular paper. She then placed these sheets into the binder, organized by theme (Christmas, Halloween, beach, sayings, etc.). Then, behind each sheet of stamps she had printed ideas for using them! Most of her inspirational sheets came from www.patstamps.com but you can just google and find great inspirational ideas everywhere for your specific stamps. I can’t wait to do this with my rubber stamp collection. My binder won’t be nearly as big as Melissa’s, but it will still be full of ideas!
3 comments so far:
I’ve since decided that it would be helpful to number my stamps and the pages to coordinate. That way, I won’t just have to say that I have that set somewhere in my closet, but that it’s Number 65 and it’s on shelf three. At this point it’s an unrealized fantasy, but maybe someday.
I love my rubber stamps. I think it would be so neat to take a piece of foam-core board, stamp a few dozen or mroe of my favorite images in random ways, color them, and frame it as wallart for my craft room.
Recently, I saw a craft room where the lady had put up pretty white shelves and used the stamps themselves as art…however, I’d have to add a room onto my house to be able to put up enough shelves to hold mine. And honestly, that’s just expensive!
I placed all of my acrylic stamps inside standard CD jewel cases. I then glue and identify the stamp on a 5″ X 5″ card stock file. It works great. I bound the file with a binder ring. When I go shopping I have this to take along so I don’t duplicate.
Julia, that is a super clever idea!