Creating or Making your Own Rubber Stamps

If you're talking about real rubber (as opposed to clear polymer-type stamps), the process is difficult and expensive enough to be prohibitive for the home crafter unless you're planning to go into the stamp business.

There are inexpensive options, though. You can hand-carve your own stamps from vinyl erasers or specialized carving material; if you're handy that way, the results can be pretty impressive, although it's difficult to get fine detail. See

for The Carving Consortium, an international group of eraser-carving artists - the site has lots of tips for beginners.Or you can take advantage of the terrific custom-stamp service provided by Ready Stamps, a project of the United Cerebral Palsy Association. Send them your images - as many as you can cram into a 9" by 7" space - on paper in black and white, and they'll send them back as a sheet of red rubber, ready to be cut apart and mounted. Not only that, but you can get the acrylic plate and polymer matrix used to cast the rubber; they're useful for all sorts of things, such as impressing on polymer clay. It's a very cool, and reasonably priced service, and the proceeds go to a worthy cause. You can read about it in detail here:

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.One of a kind stamps are less expensive andquicker to make with liquid photopolymer stamp resin.To mass produce a design, vulcanized rubber isless expensive. The video shows both methods.A computer and laser printer is the expensivepart to get started making stamp dies.