These homemade stampers are so easy to make and they're uber customizable. You can use them for pretty much anything, but my favorites are to let your child draw a small picture and you can transfer it to the stamper- saving their art forever! Or use them as personalized stampers with your child's name or monogram- perfect for creating "no itch" name labels to stamp on the inside of shirts for your child who seems to lose everything at school or camp. Just use fabric paint on the stamper instead of ink!
Here's what you'll need:
K-cups (emptied, cleaned, dried) not sure how to do this?... visit my first post on this here :)
thin cardboard (a cereal box is perfect)
paper (cardstock is recommended)
foam trays from supermarket (or foam sheets from a craft store)
hot glue
scissors
1. Trace and Cut all of your Circles
You'll need LOTS of circles!
For each K-Cup Stamper:
cardboard- trace (1) top and (2) bottoms
paper- trace (1) top
foam- trace (1) bottom
2. "Assemble" the Stamper
Use hot glue to secure one of the small cardboard circles to the bottom. Press it onto your work surface to be sure that it glues evenly.
Circling the lip of the K-Cup with hot glue, secure the big cardboard circle to the top.
Reinforce the stamp surface by gluing the second small circle to the bottom of the K-Cup. This may seem redundant, but in order to make sure the stamp image comes out clear, we need to be sure that the surface it's attached to is strong.
3. Create your Stamp
Using a really dull pencil or a mechanical pencil with no lead, draw out the designs for your stamps onto the foam circles. If you don't feel comfortable writing something backwards- using marker, write it correctly on a separate piece of foam and transfer it to your new piece. Once you trace over it with your dull pencil, clean off the marker from your stamper.
4. Glue the Foam Circles to the Bottoms of the Stampers
I don't need to include a picture of that, right?!
5. Get Stamping!!!
Stamp all of your designs onto your paper circles. If you find that one of your stamps needs more defined lines, use your pencil to dig in a bit more in the problem area, then try again. Keep in mind though, they're supposed to look quirky ;)
6. Glue your stamped paper circles onto the tops of your stampers... if you're super anal retentive like me, you'll want to make sure that the design label and the actual stamp line up so you know exactly the direction your stamp will come out :)
Now you can treasure some of your children's doodles forever! That's what the nice part of my brain is thinking... the other part is leaping for joy that there's a small chance my kids will keep their grubby mitts off of my super expensive, amazing stampers since they have their own now!!! Hmph... fat chance.
