Awhile back I found a vintage stamp still in the bag with this little booklet from All Night Media and thought I'd share my favorite bits. I don't think they exist as a company anymore (?) since all that comes up are second hand listings and I won't ask AI. A peek into a different time 🥲 I'm old and this was printed before I was born lol
It started out with a few stamps I thrifted, then I came across a huge lot of over 400 stamps up for auction in an estate sale. You would think that would satiate me forever, but it only made me hungrier for more stamps!!
So it started with me wanting to use an ink bottle stamp to swatch my inks. I couldn’t find any I liked in the right size, so I opted to draw out my own design and had a stamp custom-made through Etsy. While I was waiting for it to come in, it occurred to me that it might be fun to try my hand at carving what I wanted myself, and the result was a couple of hand-carved stamps that turned out pretty decent. I even ended up liking them more than the one I had professionally made because the hand-carved linework has a bit more character.
So I was onto the next phase. I’d settled on which of my hand carved stamps to use, and I had my swatch cards from Col-O-Ring ready. The new issue I ran into was that, while I was pretty happy with the stamped image, the stamp itself was a little difficult to maneuver because I didn’t have anything to attach to the back to hold it with. On top of that, I didn’t do the best job of trimming off the excess material around the image, which made it difficult to line it up properly on the swatch cards in order to leave enough room under the ink bottle to write out the ink details.
So I decided to try to put together a small registration jig using some scraps of cardboard and acrylic I had lying around and this is what I came up with! It required a lot of shifting things around ever so slightly to get it to where I wanted, but I got there in the end!
And yes, I’m aware this is all probably overkill for something as silly as an ink swatch, but what can I say? I like things to look consistent and also find a lot of joy out of figuring this sort of thing out and then making it myself.
I’m hoping I can make some time this coming weekend to actually sit down and swatch a decent amount of inks so I can update you all on the end result of this little passion project!