Making stamps at home does not mean making hobby briefmarken that are only suitable for children’s stamping. With a little information and the right stamp-making supplies, stamp-making is fun and easy!

Classify Stamps

For starters, rubber stamps fall into two categories: business stamps and art or craft stamps.

Business stamps are hand stamps, self-inking stamps (pre-inked) or date stamps; whose text turns them into personalized rubber stamps. If you’re using a hand stamp, you’ll need to stamp it up and down on an ink pad to fill the stamp with ink before making your imprint.

Arts and crafts stamps are much more interesting because they can use graphics such as hand-drawn artwork, craft clipart, as well as alphabets and photos. These custom stamps are used to create scrapbooks and greeting cards, and can also be used with embossing powder or ink for embossed rubber stamps. If you’ve ever tried to find rubber stamps with Chinese characters on them, you know they’re hard to find. So why not make your own? There is no limit to the art of stamping – all your stamping ideas can come to fruition once you start making stamps at home, so start collecting your rubber stamping ideas!

You’ll never have to shop from a stamp maker ever again!

The fantastic thing about making your own stamps is that you save money and avoid buying stamps from a stamp maker or company. You can purchase all your stamp making supplies or a stamp set and make your own personalized stamps, photo stamps, signature stamps and craft stamps in the comfort of your own home.

Different methods of stamp making

Sounds impossible? Well it isn’t. In fact, stamp making can be addictive once you get the basics down. You need to understand how different methods of stamp making are done, then you can search for the related stamp accessories to make your stamping ideas come true!

• Hand Carved – Creating a carved stamp is still practiced in some countries. A simple example of a carved hand stamp is carving onto erasers, but this is beyond the capabilities of most of us and is very time consuming.
• Vulcanize – You may be familiar with magenta rubber stamps that use self-adhesive foam, similar to EZMount, to stick to acrylic blocks. These are vulcanized rubber stamps like the ones you buy from Stampin Up. Vulcanized stamps require a female mold to be made for each new design, making it an expensive process for small batches of a single design. The vulcanizing heat press is also a fairly expensive stamping machine for home use.
• Laser – Sounds Hi-Tech and your bills will be too! You can also make your own stamps using a laser engraving machine, however, the expense is high, including the maintenance and running costs, which are much higher than the vulcanization process. Lasers are typically used for business style stamps that require a custom rubber stamp.
• Flash Technology – This relatively new stamping technology is not too expensive, but the finished stamp is only a single color , similar to the self-inking stamp. This means it is unsuitable for your creative craft stamps. Flash Stamp technology uses a technique that causes ink to flow through a membrane after being exposed to a light source. The areas of the membrane containing the image material are left open for the ink to flow from.
• Polymer Stamp Making – Using a liquid polymer, graphic and UV light source polymer is the clear choice for making custom stamps at home due to its simplicity and cost-effectiveness. All you need is a computer, a laser printer and a UV exposure unit and of course the right polymer for the stamp production.

Stamping with polymer rubber

Among the various ways of making stamps, the polymer stamp making technique is the winner of all available stamp making methods for stamp makers at home. Manufacturing polymer stamps allows you to get professional quality custom rubber stamps at the lowest possible price!

It may surprise you that polymer stamp manufacturing is the most common method of commercial stamp manufacturing today. The majority of business ink stamps, self-inking personalized stamps and increasingly craft stamps are now more commonly polymer stamps. Polymer stamps are also known as acrylic polymer stamps, clear stamps, clear rubber stamps, and rubber plastic stamps. Interestingly, polymer stamps contain no rubber at all and are still called rubber stamps!

Stamp Making Rules

Before you start making your own polymer stamps, there are three important factors to consider when it comes to polymers. Pay attention to this and you can be assured of a quality stamp.

• Polymers for plate making – Widely used in the printing industry Not all photopolymer plates produce stamps. For making a stamping tool, a polymer with a hardness of 40 is ideal; this is the hardness scale of the cured polymer. InstaPlate is just such a polymer designed for making stamps and is best suited for home use. It is available as a photopolymer gel in a sachet (commonly known as “polymer in a sachet”). With InstaPlate you can be sure you’re getting a good quality polymer, so make sure to request it when you’re investigating your stamp making offering.

• Polymer Solidification – Some stamp making kits use other types of polymers that solidify under natural light or a single light bulb. This is not recommended as polymers that solidify under a certain UVA light range are always better. All professional stamp makers use polymers like InstaPlate as it allows control of UVA light at a specific wavelength to make stamps. So invest in a quality UV exposure unit along with a commercial polymer like InstaPlate to create stamps like the pros. This is especially important if you are interested in making wholesale stamps at home for resale.

• Strength of Your Stamp – We often come across polymer stamps with no structural backing, allowing the stamp to naturally adhere to a mounting block. Although these appear great, they are prone to cracking, smudging and distortion. A strong durable backing avoids these problems and is becoming very popular now that we have products like EZMount and InstaGrip . InstaGrip is a new method of attaching stamps to acrylic blocks and is a repositionable attachment system designed to attach stamps to acrylic. InstaGrip is basically a clear, thin silicone repositioning mat that sticks to both the stamp back and the acrylic block. Because it’s transparent, you can see through the stamp and block to place your imprint, making your stamping process easier than ever.

The light source

You don’t have to spend a fortune on a light source to make hobby at home. Commercial stamping machines have built-in timers that control the exposure of the polymer and are quite expensive. A better alternative for stamp making at home is a smaller craft stamp maker that uses an external portable countdown timer. The UVA light output from one of these units produces the same quality stamp as the larger commercial stamp making systems.

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