How to carve a custom rubber stamp

Making your own stamps can be so much fun, to add a personalised touch to cards, gift tags, scrapbook pages and other craft projects. Small and medium-sized stamps can be carved from erasers, which are easy to obtain, and have the advantage that they don’t need mounting on a wooden block to be used.

To make your own stamp you’ll need:

• White plastic eraser – other types of eraser can be used, but white plastic is both easy to carve, and long-lasting
• exacto knife, scalpel, or similar straight, fine, pointed blade
• V-shaped gouge – these can be found in many craft stores, and are the only piece of specialised equipment you’ll need.
• Soft pencil or ballpoint pen
• image you wish to turn into a stamp. For your first attempt, you may wish to choose or design an image made up of blocks of colour, rather than one with fine lines.

The first step is to transfer your image to the eraser. You can simply draw straight onto the eraser with ballpoint pen, remembering that an image drawn directly on will come out reversed when stamped. Alternatively, if you have an image on paper, cover the dark areas of the image with soft pencil, then lay the penciled side of the paper against the eraser and rub it. This will transfer the pencil to the eraser, and the image will also be reversed as it should be. If the transferred image is faint or blurry, you can go over it with ballpoint pen.

The first part of the actual carving involves cutting the outline of the stamp with your straight blade. Cut lightly at first, and do not drag or force the blade as this can tear the surface, spoiling your smooth lines. Cut along all the lines, angling your blade so that the cut slopes down from the stamp image into the background. Cutting straight down will make a usable stamp, but it will not last as long. ‘Undercutting’, angling the knife so it actually cuts out some rubber from under the edge of the image, will produce a stamp that blobs ink and crumbles easily.

Curved lines will be smoother if you rotate the eraser rather than pulling the knife round in a curve. Any place two lines meet in a point, you should cut towards the point so that the rubber doesn’t get distorted as you cut. If you have a line where both ends form a sharp corner, start in the middle of the line and cut to one point, then come back and cut from the middle to the other point. Try, whenever possible, to cut away from your fingers rather than towards them.

Where your lines are fairly close together, you’ll find that you can remove the background just by deepening the two angled cuts so that they meet in a V-shaped channel. You can only make the cuts so deep though, so for larger areas of background, you’ll need your v-gouge.Use the point of the gouge at a low angle (10-30 degrees from horizontal) to carefully carve away the background, a small sliver at a time. Be especially careful near the lines of your design, as trying to cut away too much at once may end up with you tearing the surface and spolilng your nice clean cuts.

When you think you’ve cut away enough, test your stamp on some paper. You can then refine the image with the point of your blade, and use a pin or sewing needle to tease out any small slivers of rubber that are still adhering to the surface. Continue test-stamping and refining until you’re happy with the stamped image.

You can label your stamp by stamping the image on a piece of paper and then sticking it to the uncarved side of the eraser.

N.B. Stamp-carving tools are sharp by necessity, and careless handling, e.g. pushing the blade too hard, may cause them to skip or slip unexpectedly. Young children should not use these tools without *very* close supervision.

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