Making a stamp

I know nothing at all about carving stamps, but after getting sick of working with potatoes (!) I recently decided to give it a go. I've now had a few attempts and am finding it a bit easier each time. Last week I carved this lucky four-leafed clover stamp for a friend's birthday. Here's what I did:

First up, I drew the design directly onto the rubber in pencil. If you're doing words (like my 'eko' stamp), avoid wasting a lot of time like I did and remember it has to be backwards (duh!). To achieve this, I simply wrote the word onto paper and then rubbed over the back with pencil to transfer it to the rubber.

Next up, I went to my trusty tool set - I've been using a Tombo wood-carving set of James's, which so far has been working a treat. I used the angled blade tool to trace around the edge of the design, cutting as deeply as I could and keeping the lines as clean as possible.

Then I used two other tools to cut out the rubber from around the edges - a scooped, angled tool to cut the finer parts and a square flat blade to cut out bigger chunks. Having the edges already defined makes it a lot easier to get a good result. Once the main parts were cut away, I cleaned it up with the larger blade to get a smoother finish and to make sure there were no chunks that were sticking out too far and would catch the ink.

Here's the finished stamp! Now let's see how it works...

Hooray! It works a treat :) If there had been any green on the cut-away area I would have cut this away to make sure I got a clean result. And what did I do with it?

Made a card! You might have noticed I'm loving repeat patterns and bright colours at the moment :)

Happy belated birthday, Denis!

PS If you have any tips for me on stamp-carving, I would love to hear them!