Hand Carved Rubber Stamp Tutorial: Hydrangea

These are our new stamps, Hydrangea. You need a little practice to create this image, but it is pretty simple!

First, we stamp 3 petals with a lot of ink.

Then, with a less ink, stamp the petals around the first 3.

Tune the whole shape with even less ink.  Flower part is now completed.

Let's show you how to add leaves next, without ruining the image of the flower we have just created.

In order to prevent the flower and the leaves from overlapping, you need to take some green ink off the

leaf stamp below.

We use Kleenex to take lower half of the ink off, by tapping motion. Don't wipe off.

Just stamp around the flower. You can see how the green ink fades off and don't overlap with the flower image, can't you?

This is an easy, but useful technique!

Hand Carved Stamp: Wine Bottle and Glass plus Cheese

We took a personalized stamp order from Madoka. She saw our stamp “Wine Bottle & Glass” on our Etsy store and wanted to personalize it by adding her and her husband name plus cheese (because they love wines and her husband likes cheese, she said). I had to re-position the wine bottle and glass to balance the whole design when names and cheese are added. Including cheese in the design worked pretty good to fill the empty space below the names.

Hand Carved Stamp: Goldfish in a Bowl

The inked impressions of hand carved stamps are generally 2-dementional. Giving 3-dementional appearance to the stamped images is a challenge for stamp carvers, but developing inking technique to add gradations to the ink is one of the solutions.

This is how I do it.
Preparing wet paper towel, crumpled small Kleenex ball and a peace of Kleenex.
Making a pad with the Kleenex ball and a peace of Kleenex.
Appling ink to the stamp. Wetting the pad and taking some ink off the stamp by tapping motions. This is how the image looks like. Cleaning the stamp with wet paper towel. I tried with lighter ink to show more transparency of the glass bowl, but the impression was too weak. So, I added darker ink to the top and bottom of the stamp. Added a goldfish in the bowl.

Hand Carved Stamp: Goldfish and Water Plant

We planed to make goldfish stamp last summer, but hadn’t come up with a design we liked. We drew several designs and found out that the design should be kept small and simple. Larger size design loses the cuteness of the goldfish and adding details makes it look ugly to us. We also knew that just simple design would look too simple. So, we wanted to add transparency of the fin to the design. But, how? The solution was actually quite simple. This is how we achieved the transparency effect of the fin of the goldfish.
Putting ink on the stamp and taking some ink off the fin by tapping it on a Kleenex. Pretty simple!

Music Themed Personalized Stamp: As a Birthday Gift

Ooooooops. It’s been such a long time.

Friends complained. We know, we know. We will try.

I carved this stamp as a birthday gift for a friend.

Whole stamp carving process is mostly fun, but creating a new design is sometimes frustrating. As the friend is a very good piano player, the theme of the design came up pretty quick. I drew some designs on the paper to visualize what's in my head; the name surrounded by some notes. However, they didn’t look pretty at all. I kept drawing and drawing and when I almost gave up, I finally ended up with this design. I changed the font and the position of the note. This is how the completed stamp looks like.

Handcarved Nightmare Before Christmas Stamp: Sally

This character is from the movie “Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas” released in 1993, a year before we came to the US. We didn’t know what Halloween was at that time, which was exactly like the main character in the movie “Jack Skellington” from Halloween town couldn’t figure out what Christmas was all about after visiting Christmas town accidentally. We were so fascinated by the movie when we watched it on video for the first time. The motion picture style was very eye catching, but what amazed us the most was that how rather a scary looking Sally looked more and more charming as the story progressed!

Handcarved summer stamp Part 3, Bunny on Beach

I made this stamp based on my memory of going to the beach as a little kid. Not so many families were able to afford taking a vacation or going for a trip those days, but my mom used to take us to the nearby beach and it was a huge and an exciting event during summer breaks. We had no box full of toys, no DVDs, or no Nintendo but somehow we never got bored back then.

Customized stamp order, Today I marry • • •

This is a customized stamp we have recently made for Michelle. The whole process of making this stamp, communicating with Michelle, was really fun. She wanted to use this stamp for her wedding programs. The size of the design is 1 ½” x 3 ½’. Our stamps are usually smaller as we want them to be versatile. So, this became the largest of all stamps we have made. Wood block was dyed and distressed as the plane wood block looked to simple for the size. We hope she likes it. We are glad to be able to take part in the creation of her wedding programs.

Handcarved stamp, customized stamp orders from St. Louis

We got two customized stamp orders from St. Louis when we visited a friend there. One of the orders was from Shiho who is a friend of our friend in St. Louis. She brought a design with her and wanted to add “Shiho’s Kitchen” under the design. This cute design only measured ¾” x ¾” and some part of it was very detailed. I could have made the design a little larger to make it easier to carve but I decided to use the original size. The bigger size didn’t look as cute as the original one.
The other order was from Madoka. She wanted a personalized stamp of cosmos flower. I designed a single cosmos flower and added her name to it, but there was too much empty space between the flower and the name. I could have filled that space with leaves if it was a design that uses other flowers, but cosmos doesn’t have pretty leaves. So, I added one more cosmos instead.

Handcarved summer stamp Part 2, Shell

This shell design couldn’t have been carved without new v-shaped gouge I recently ordered from Japan. I depend heavily on general craft knife when carving stamps but always had difficulty carving hairlines. I used to avoid hairlines as much as possible when I designed images for new stamps, but not anymore! I can carve 4 hairlines within 1/8” with the gouge.
The design look simple but I am personally very satisfied with the result.
Pastel colors inks such as light blue or light yellow would go well with the stamp.

Summer stamp part 1, Lobster

We’ve, somehow, always wanted to make a stamp with lobster design but haven’t had a chance to begin on. We don’t remember exactly why we want lobster stamp although there is no ocean here in Minnesota. It is probably because we both were raised in a city nearby ocean and love seafood.
We have finally finished custom framing of cross stitch samplers that a friend of ours had asked us to do. Maybe it’s time to start working on stamps again.
The new design is off course LOBSTER, a taste of summer!

Stamped with red ink, the lobster is now cooked and looks delicious.

Handcarved Stamp, Flower and Humming Birds

We recently had an order of a personalized stamp from Shannon. She requested to add one more name to our original “Flower and Humming bird” design, but the original design can fit only one name. So, we re-designed to make one more name fit. We added another humming bird to balance the size of the design and the names.
Copied the design to a carving rubber.
On the middle of the carving process.
My shoulders are tight.
Mounted the stamp on finished wood.
We hope she likes the stamp and enjoys using it.

TC Witchcraft Factory congratulate Shannon and Daniel on their Wedding!

Handcarved Stamps

It all started from an idea that “we want to have a small shop stamp” we can use on our products. We searched on Etsy to look for a store we could custom-order our stamp. There were stores making cute handcarved stamps but none of them had a taste of our shop name, Witchcraft. So, we said “why don’t we make it by ourselves”. But the idea was put aside for a while just because we thought it would not be easy to hand carve the size of stamp we wanted.
One day, we found a curving rubber and reasonable carving tools at a local art supply and decided to give it a try. This is the stamp we carved for the first time.
It does not look nice but the stamped image has the taste we wanted.
Since then we have become addicted to stamp carving.