How to craft your own rubber stamps

There are countless professionally made rubber stamps to choose from, but sometimes it's more fun to create your own from scratch. Homemade rubber stamps can give a rustic look to a card design, which might be just the effect you're looking for in a distressed project. You can use homemade rubber stamps in the same way that you'd use an ordinary shop bought stamp.

Carving your own stamps

You can make small rubber stamps by carving out simple designs on one side of an ordinary pencil eraser, using a sharp craft knife. Background
Sometimes simple designs are best when you're making a card. Repeatedly rubber stamping the same image over the surface of a card or piece of craft paper is an effective way to create your own background. Design
Start with very simple designs, such as a cross, and draw this onto the surface of the eraser with a pencil or marker. Use a craft knife to carefully trim away the areas of rubber that are outside the cross itself, so you are left with a raised portion of rubber, which forms your design.
Potato Stamps - Making potato stamps is a fun activity for children, although they do need supervision if they're using sharp knives. - Cut a potato in half, and trim away areas of the potato to leave a raised surface in the centre. It's easy to make block shapes such as triangles or squares, or you could use the entire surface of the potato to print oval shapes or circles in different sizes. - You can also make a negative image print by digging out portions of the surface of a cut potato. For instance, you could dig out a star shape in the centre. When you print, the area around the star will be solid colour but the star itself will have no ink, allowing the colour of the paper to show through. Stamps made from potatoes won't last very long, but are an inexpensive way to introduce children to stamp crafts.

Professional kits

Kits such as the Imagepac Daylight kit, allow you to create professional quality rubber stamps at home. The kit contains everything you need to make rubber stamps for your original artwork that you either draw freehand or print out on a home printer. You can also create stamps from existing images, which you should print in black, not colour. You can create the stamps using special light-sensitive gel sachets that harden when they are exposed to light. This transfers the image to the gel inside the sachet. The kit has different sized sachets, so you can make rubber stamps in various sizes.