Stamp mounts

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By early afternoon Arlene had two of each of our new stamp designs on cushion. That meant she had put double-sticky tape on the sheets of rubber they were vulcanized on, cut the stamp dies out, adhered them to sponge rubber cushion with double-sticky tape on the back, and trimmed the cushion close to the designs. That’s 9-inch wide double sticky tape, not off the shelf at Staples. Now it’s my turn to get mounts ready for them. My favorite part of the whole stamp business is seeing the first print from each new design, and it is a print on the block of wood that becomes the mount for the first stamp. That becomes the indexing stamp that I use to print the image on the mounts for all the other stamps of that design. When people at crafts sales ask how a stamp prints I say, “It prints just like you see on top of the stamp, because that’s how the image got onto the top of the stamp.”

So, by now I have a workbench covered with wooden blocks of all the right sizes for the new designs. It took some time with the table saw and the belt sander, because not all of them are sizes that I had precut blocks for. I’m going to stop writing and get my hands inky now. Just as well, because I didn’t do much else except take my new bike for a four mile test ride and clean off my desk, neither of which makes much of a story.