Stamp Out Bikes

Stamp them out all day long with this little gem!

My friend Carol needed a rubber stamp of a bike to personalize her MS150 Thank-you notes, but we couldn't find one in the stores. I happened to have a 4x6 inch square of rubber stamp material, which I bought last year, so I told her I'd just make one.

Of course, I had never made one before, but that didn't seem like too big of a deal. I've done a few wood block prints, just for kicks, and I figured this would be easier than that. Turns out that it was.

I took a drawing I had done a couple of years back, for another crafts project, and did a photocopy reduction of it to the size Carol wanted. Then, with a medium-heat clothes iron, I transferred the image to the rubber block.

From there, it was just a matter of carving down the rubber where I didn't want it to print. The fenders were a little tricky (I used a large sewing needle to pick out between the lines).

After I made a couple of test prints, I trimmed off the high spots and glued the stamp to a block of scrap wood I had lying around.

I'm pretty happy with it, considering it was my first try at making a rubber stamp.