paper: RIP (or how I killed a rubber stamp) | pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

This is a first for me. I’ve officially killed a rubber stamp. It’s passed on. It is no more. Its stamping abilities cease to be. This, I do declare, is now an ex-stamp! (I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it.)

Or at the very least, it has cracked, dried and worn away after many, many years of well-meant abuse.

I think this was probably the first background stamp I ever purchased—those big background stamps always seemed so expensive so I never thought I could spent so much money on one design. It’s a scribbled handwriting that actually says nothing designed by A Stamp in the Hand and I started using it as soon as I found it. Thing is, it went with everything since it said nothing! So I used it for everything. Every imaginable theme for every imaginable scrapbook page! So I stamped it with every colour of plain old dye ink I could find. Then every colour of pigment ink I could find. Then I decided it needed to be embossed, so it was slathered with rather liberal amounts of Versamark ink. And possibly I forgot to clean off the Versamark ink a few too many times so eventually the Versamark sticky finish became a new feature of the stamp itself. Not to worry—surely stamping with bleach would remove the Versamark? Turns out no, but this stamp did look pretty fabulous stamped with bleach, so not a total loss.

Well, once the surface was sticky it seemed like I had no excuse to even try to keep it pristine. So I dunked it in acrylic paint. Stamped it into ultra-thick embossing powder. And beeswax. And silver clay.

And of course if I loved this stamp so much, I had to share my love for it with others, so I used it in apromixately a gazillion scrapbook class projects over the years. Usually when I use stamps in a class, I have a class set of at least a few to share, but not this one: just one single stamp to be passed around the room. So friends and total strangers used it too, with every kind of ink and paint and whatever else they could throw it out.

Somewhere along the line I grew to love a second background stamp bought from a tiny little company that only sold unmounted red rubber stamps. Of course I could have mounted it on its own block but clearly that was too much trouble and would take up too much space. Instead I used photo splits to stick it to the wooden side of the first stamp. Professional stamp mounting, that. And then I could carry my two favourite stamps in barely any space. So now both sides of the wood could become equally engrained with a muddy spectrum of inks and paints and well, no one would try to steal this item if I left my crop gear unattended.

So while many of my rubber stamps give me pangs of guilt for the sheer neglect they receive—used a few times then practically forgotten—this stamp has now been pressed past its life. I’ve actually stamped it so much that the raised surface is no longer raised and if I try to ink it, nothing sticks. Instead, this stamp just sits there reminding me that I used and abused it beyond belief. I mean, I practically had to nail it to the table just to take the picture.

Google has just told me they still make this stamp. Jury is out on whether I will succumb to another eight years of scribbled nothingness. For now, I’ll wear this stamp like a badge of honour, I think.

xlovesx

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16 April 2009

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