hey there creative people sandy here - have you ever looked at sets of metal
design stamps like these and thought they were cool and interesting and maybe they
even have designs you liked but you wondered what you could do with them?
well Beebeecraft sent me this set and today I'm going to show you a bunch of ideas
for creative ways you can use metal design stamps - welcome to another Friday
findings video at keepsakecrafts.net - so this is the set of design stamps that I
got from Beebeecraft - I think they're pretty cool they have a lot of detail if
you look at just this little tree stamp which is I'm not even 3/8 of an inch
I guess the whole thing is maybe 3/8 of an inch across there's a lot of detail
lots of little swirls and really pretty stamps - some of the designs are simpler
like an arrow but even so you've got the fletchings down here the individual ones
some are more bold and some are more delicate like this one I'm not sure what
that's called but it's kind of a botanical thing or you might just have a
more graphic representation of a bear or hearts, an owl he's really cute - one of my
favorites of course is the kitty cat I'll be using that later - what else have
we got let's see just to go through them all
a dragonfly, a star, a cross, an anchor and the infinity sign and you might look
at a set like this and say what am I gonna do with that? they are made for a
few different things - they are made for stamping on metal you can also stamp on
leather- I'm not familiar with leather stamping so I but I do wonder just how
well some of the really fine detail will come through on leather maybe those of
you have done leather work can chime in and let us know - that's just what it says
in the product listing, and of course being a polymer clayer I think of ways
I can use these on polymer clay as well - now here's an example of me playing
with this polymer clay and here are a few examples of me playing with this on
metal if you want to learn one or the other I must tell you they both take a
bit of practice to get good at them this was my first one
it's an utter mess this was my second one it's slightly less of a mess this
was my practice piece you can tell I was eager to get on and I did like three
practice punches and then said okay fine this one came out actually not bad
except I kind of did a poor job on the letter I you can use these in
conjunction with letter stamps by the way and I'll tell you more about that in
a minute these are this is a set that there is a similar one that on the
Beebeecraft site for about eleven dollars this set of twelve is fifteen dollars so it's
not bad I mean they're nice they're metal like I said they're made for
stamping on metal you pound on them with a brass mallet mine's probably a little
light but they hold up well I used just about all of these and they seem to do
well they gave nice impressions like I said a lot of them had a lot of detail
and I was impressed with the the quality of the images that I got if you're
stamping on metal or you're stamping on polymer clay I don't know about
leather but I can tell you those two things both require some practice but
both are completely different animals - they just are different in what you have
to pay attention to for the most part in order to get a nice clean image so
decide what you want to do and then practice - now for metal you can use a
sandbag that just helps dampen the sound and what you absolutely need is a bench
block you should take better care of your bench block than I do because any
lines or divots on the bench block are going to come through to the back of
your piece so if that matters to you you need to do a better job of taking care
of your bench block than I do you absolutely must do
this kind of metal stamping on a bench block and you don't want to use you
chasing hammer you want to use something that gives you a dead blow which means
something that isn't going to blow boy yo yo yo yo yoing after you hit it
when that happens you end up getting double stamped images instead of a nice
clean stamping so a brass hammer and it's recommended that you use one that's
at least a pound I think this is 8 ounces so I should probably if I want to
do a lot of this I should probably invest in a heavier
hammer another thing that's handy is a rawhide mallet or this one happens to
also have a plastic mallet on the other side which is perfect and I'll show you
why in a minute then you need some kind of metal to
stamp on - it can be any any metal that is soft enough to take an impression you
don't want really hard metals or hardened metals but this is copper, brass,
aluminum, gold filled, silver filled, sterling silver, any of those as long as
it's soft enough to take an impression you can stamp in it - if you try making
impressions in hardened metals you may damage your stamps - now I am no expert at
this I just kind of dabble - these discs by the way you can often buy them this I
just got at the craft store some time ago just a little three-quarter inch
discs I think it had yeah six discs in here for a few dollars it wasn't much
this is one I was practicing dapping on - but you can buy them like this you can
buy them online Fire Mountain Gems if you want to learn more details about the
basics of stamping on metal I will give you a link to Lisa Niven Kelly's really
great tutorial at Beaducation, it's like 40 minutes and she gives you so
much great information there one of the things she also provides there is a link
where you can print out this sheet and this is kind of useful it shows
different sizes it's got measurements but this is the thing that I wanted it's
a circle divider because you can place your piece in here take a sharpie
and a ruler and then you can draw right on your blank guidelines so if you're
going to make a mandala type design or anything that you want spaced evenly you
can just draw it right on your metal blank and this is really useful you can
use tape - tape will help you in a couple ways
tape can help you to get just to hold something in place so it doesn't move
around on you on this little piece this was a blank that I got at artbeads.com
came in, it came in a 2-pack and it was just a little stamping blank and you
can see I used the heart and the kitty cat on this one plus the letter I from
my letter set to make pick a cute little thing - I could actually curve this
if I wanted it's soft enough to bend a little bit and make it into a bracelet, add a
couple pieces of cord on either side - the thing that really intrigued me about
this set was using these things to make designs all their own mandalas like I
said this is the first one I did, notice when you get close to the edge things
can really distort especially if you start out doing it on the edge and take
a look at what happened here I'll flip it over see maybe can see it more
dramatically I did that arrow stamp I thought it would make an interesting
border all the way around this design but what happened is that in some cases
it actually pierced the metal but in all the cases it pushed it out because it
was the very first thing I stamped the blank was still soft do remember that
the more you stamp on it the more hardened this metal is going to get so
like this was one of the first things I stamped which I thought was interesting
I mean you could say oops or you could say hmmm design opportunity! so I'll just
give you a couple of basics, first of all if it's not flat can you see that this
is slightly shaped like a potato chip it's not flat this is where your rawhide
or your plastic or a rubber mallet comes in just flatten it out a little and now
that's you can hear the difference it's nice and flat so it's going to behave
and it's as lisa mentions in her class the complex design shapes can be a
little bit trickier to stamp than something simple like oh the letter O or
the letter i' but the owl can be pretty complex so I would strongly suggest that
you go to her to go to that site and learn about it but the basics are that
you don't want to hold this up too high you want to hold it down low that way
you have a good grip on I've got my middle finger here it's actually resting
right on the block and the metal holding this right in place and then for these
complex ones she gives a tip for instead of just doing one blow straight down
which you can do with simpler stamps but this little owl has so much detail she's
suggesting that you tilt like this but ever so slightly so north south east
west just a little bit so I'll show you what that looks like and you can watch
her do it better if you go to the video but it's one more for good measure - now
that's not great - I could have done more you can you see on the left side
sometimes you can snap it back into I don't think I can on this one, some of
the designs it'll snap right back into place and you can restamp, most of the
time you won't be able to - there's a lot of detail in that little owl! one thing I
was really pleased about with this set of stamps that I got from Beebeecraft is
that they are marked to keep your orientation straight so it also has the
little owl here stamped on it and it has the name of the company so that I know
when I'm holding it the owl is facing if I
stamp it I'm going to be looking at him right side up, you'll have to look at
them some of them are a little different I think the cat's actually the other way
around but you just have to figure it out yeah
the cat actually if I'm looking at the stamping and the name when I stamp it it
will be upside down so you just have to know that but it is helpful to have
these so if these are all laid out on a table if you carefully set them down you
won't have to keep fumbling through every single one to see what design it
is that you want next, you can also double stamp things this actually I did
by mistake I was trying to fit a heart in and it slipped on me because like I
said the thing was getting hardened and it was getting curled and the heart
slipped and stamped over the arrow and I said well Oh perfect.
so there's a lot you can do with these you just need to experiment and play but
there is an art to stamping just enough and not too much like for this with
these little letter stamps you can see here I stamped way too hard I think I
was getting used to stamping these like this cat in fact I did the heart a
little too hard I don't know if you can see on this right edge I caught a little
bit of the the outer edge of the stamp there that's not too bad but this one's
pretty bad I got like almost the whole ring around the "I" there I probably
needed to do one blow for this nice and straight and up and down and I would
have been fine - another cool trick is that you can see that the interior of
these is blackened so you really can see the designs where it isn't on this and
all you have to do is color it in with a sharpie then you can use a pro polish
pad or some steel wool to polish the black out - if you steel wool what you end
up getting is this brushed effect so you have to decide if you want that just
what I did here I didn't really do a thorough job see if we can get this
see more of a brushed effect but now you can see more of the detail of the owl and
you can see more the detail that I didn't stamp cleanly and then the pro
polish pads will get it shiny and remove see how that sharpie is going
away and it's not getting the brushed effect so there are loads of variations
on this I am barely even scratching the surface but that is one thing you can do
with these stamps is make personalized jewelry by stamping on metal cuff
bracelets, pendants, charms, make wine glass charms... oh that's what I started to
say and I didn't finish that I actually used actually was this bit a painter's
tape and laid it right here it helped hold this in place and also helped me
have a straight line when I was stamping so those came out pretty straight - so you
can use the designs to bracket or surround an initial, or you can also like
flip the designs around maybe stamp a row of hearts and then flip the heart
around the other way so that you get a pattern that's filled in - get yourself
some like 24 gauge metal I got this on Amazon ages ago and practice and you
probably should practice more than I did before you go into your blanks, copper is
great because it's inexpensive so you can just practice on it - so here's a
polymer clay mandala I was just messing around and playing with I antiqued it
with black paint after baking it just so you could see some of the detail a
little bit better, you can use polymer clay in the same way as I just said to
make mandalas to make personalized pendants, charms, etc
to just make an overall pattern but the the things that you learn in the metal
stamping are completely different from what you need to learn to do it in
polymer clay - now here's a cool trick so many times I've suggested using these
acrylic blocks for polymer clay and I always say to not have the etched lines
down if your blocks have these etched lines which these do, you know make sure
that you don't have it facing your clay because you don't want it to
be imprinted in your clay in this case it's actually a really helpful thing, I
don't know if you're going to be able to pick it up with the camera but I'm gonna
just flatten this out I kind of like this better than cutting it out with a
cutter cuz I just get a nice soft edge and I don't know if you can see it but
now I have that crosshatch line in here it's not exactly centered but it gives
you a guideline the problem with stamping on polymer
clay let's try this little bear is that it's really easy to go too far - you have
to just get a feel for your individual stamps and the softness of your clay
because if you press too hard... well there I have a beautiful image of the bear but
I also have a beautiful ring around him from the stamp, maybe that's what you
want probably not and you probably just want the bear and that's pretty good
maybe not hard enough let's try it a little harder but not too much so you
can see that it takes a little bit of practice to get it so that you don't
have those edges, those three actually well that one's a little too light, those
two came out pretty good and there are loads and loads of these design stamps
out there there are whole sets that are, well he's cute especially when stamped
properly, but again press just a little bit too hard, oh that wasn't hard enough
so you can see what you really need to practice and you probably need to
practice a little yeah see now I've got that I've got a nice deep impression of
the owl but a faint halo of the round edge of the stamp so it's just going to
take some practice to get a feel for again, the squishiness of your clay, the
depth of your stamp, something like this could actually be
trickier - let's see see you do need to practice holding it straight up and down
that one actually came out pretty good but where it's got just a straight edge
it would be very easy to simply rock it a little bit too much to one side and
then you have that -of course with clay I mean who wants to have to take time to
do this you could actually smooth it out a little - so I was really pleased with
these design stamps and at first the assortment seemed random but then the
more I looked at them the more I thought of different ways of using them and
combining them like this infinity symbol would be just a really pretty border
around something see that you can also purposely only use part of the stamp you
can do this in metal or in the clay and like just get although again it will
take some practice to get it just right like I'm just getting the top of that
heart and if I line them up well and did it evenly I end up with a nice little
row of scallops - although that you may look at this and just wonder what on
earth you could do with it all with a little bit of practice and playing and
imagination I suspect you can come up with all kinds of ideas - so you could
tell whole stories with these spell out sentences the way people do with just
emojis, so many creative possibilities.