Mounting Stamps

I recently discovered that while I had been scrapbooking and stamping a lot, I had a lot of stamp sets that I had never mounted. For those of you who have never bought stamps from Stampin' Up! before, let me share with you what to expect. You will recieve a plastic storage box with lots of wood blocks, a page of stamp image stickers, and a sheet of foam mounted rubber. The idea being that you can put the image sticker where you want on one side of the wood block, and the rubber where you want on the other side of the block. The nice thing about this is that you get full control of your stamps, the downside is you probably have some apprehension about how to actually get the suckers on the block just right. I know I did!

I read the paperwork provided by SU and did some research on the internet and boy was I confused. But after some advice from some fellow demonstrators and a lot of practice, I now have many mounted stamps and a lot more confidence. Though I don't know how much longer I will need it as Stampin' Up! has started die cutting all of their new designs so you no longer have to do the cutting.... just pop out the image from the rubber sheet, stick it on the wood, and you are off stamping!

But just in case there are those of you staring at your unmounted stamps and feeling a little overwhelmed like I was, here are the tips I learned. Leave me a note if you have other tips to share or questions about these steps!

1. Start by separating your rubber images and grab your best scissors. If you have the Stampin' Up! rubber scissors, great! If you don't, that's okay, just pick the best you have aiming for sharp, medium to small sized blades. The first time I cut out a stamp, I used a Fiskars long craft scissor and it didn't work out so great (I highly recommend the SU scissors!) Most of the rubber sheets have extra blank space so you can try cutting there to get a feel for how easy or tough cutting will be.

2. Now you are ready to start cutting out your images. In general you want to cut close to your image (without cutting the raised part) and make sure you are cutting straight up and down through the rubber and foam. This is very important because if you cut at an angle so that you have less foam than rubber, you may have a harder time getting an even image. Feel free to cut with curves or straight lines (straight lines tend to be easiest so I recommend them if you aren't cutting out a circle image), just make sure you are cutting straight up and down.

3. Now, take your rubber images and match them up with their respective wood blocks. This lets you make sure you know which blocks go with with images before you start putting on the stickers or rubber. :) Let me tell you, it can be easier than you think to pick the wrong block on some sets if you skip this step.

4. Place the image stickers on one side of the matching wooden block. Some images can only fit on the block one way, others could be oriented in any direction. In those cases, I imagined I was stamping the image to see which grip on the block felt the most "right" and then placed the sticker in that orientation.

5. Now you get to mount the rubber image to the opposite side of the block as the matching image. It is up to you how much of a perfectionist you want to be. I have a friend who just placed everything "center" in the block and if they didn't quite match, oh well. I, on the other hand, seem to spend about 5 min per block looking at it every which angle to try to line up the rubber and the image as perfectly as possible.

6. Finally, put the mounted stamps back in the plastic case and put the stamp set name sticker on the side of the box, and now you are ready to get stamping!

Oh, just a couple more tips.

• If you place your rubber and then realize you want to change it, you have a short window where you should be able to pull it up. If it has been a while or you are unsure, you can pop your stamp in the microwave for 5-10 seconds to lightly melt the adhesive and it should pop right off!


• I have heard hot exacto knives can work wonders for trimming off extra rubber from a stamp after it is mounted on the block. Multiple people say "it cuts through the rubber like butter" so that might be a good trick too.


• If a stamp image also has a phrase on the same piece of rubber, I will sometimes cut the phrase out separately and mount it on the end of the wood block. Its like 2 stamps for the price of 1!