Home Made Two-Step Stamps for Art Journalling

When I saw Claudine Hellmuth's Two-Step stamps I just loved them. They're as cool as cool can be. But, my budget just doesn't have the wiggle room in it right now. In no small part because of this rather large delivery:

That's a lot of wood and concrete. Oh my!

Anyhow. 

I saw a great tutorial on the Craftzine blog for no carve acrylic style stamps made with plexiglass and silicone. Click that link, they made it look easy :-)

So I got it in my head to make simple foam stamps and then make the acrylic style doodle outlines for them. 

You really should go read their tutorial as mine isn't very thorough. But you take your plexiglass, figure out how you want to cut it and then score it several times with an craft blade.

Next you hold the line against the edge of your table and WHACK IT really, really hard. We managed to hurt ourselves doing this. For my second batch I bought thinner plexiglass then suggested and it snapped with ease while still being rigid enough to stamp with.

You'll need two plexiglass bases in each size, one for the foam stamp, one for the silicone.

For the foam stamp, cut craft foam (I used the thick stuff from Michaels, it's about a buck a sheet) in whatever shape you like and glue it on your base with tacky glue. 

Let it dry over night and then check it out. I used ink on these even though they are well suited for paint. Since it was just a test on printer paper I didn't feel like getting a brush out.

Yay! Me likey!

For the silicone step, place the matching-size base over top of your foam stamp and doodle with your silicone. Let dry over night. Just a tip, don't lay your plexiglass over your stamped image as it'll come out backwards because your outlining the mirror image. I did... not good.

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Now have fun stamping. You can use paint on the foam stamps and then once it's dry use paint or ink on the outline stamp.

And here are the finished pages I made using my new stamps:

Click on the pictures to see the details

I've been art journalling everyday as challenged by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer

I hope to have a lot more completed pages to show you soon. They'd probably go a lot faster if I didn't decided to make my own stamps. LOL.