care of the Silhouette stamp blocks - don't make this mistake

I put a stamp on a stamp block that came with the Silhouette stamping starter kit - on the side with the white guide lines. When I cleaned the stamp and block with Isocol it started taking the Silhouette logo and lines off!! I pulled the stamp off and cleaned it separately and cleaned the rest of the block very carefully. Next time I will use the other side.
 Isocol, an alcohol antiseptic, makes a great stamp cleaner and is cheaper than buying special stamp cleaner in little bottles. It even cleans up STAZON.  And you can get it at supermarkets.

my opinions on how to use the Silhouette stamp material stamps and a small dig at Kaisercraft

Kaisercraft small block with handle

 the same one inked and pressed onto paper

Only a small dig at Kaisercraft. I have heaps of their paper and three sets of the alterable drawers plus a wooden album shaped like a train. All great stuff.

Anyway I have a set of stamp tools from them - three clear plastic blocks and a removable turquoise handle.  They seemed not to make a good stamped impression, so I put some ink on the small one and pressed it onto paper without a stamp attached - see the picture. The grid lines wouldn't show up if you had a stamp there, well not too much, but the white oval around the handle area and the white square in the middle are showing that the pressure is not distributed evenly over the stamp.

As to how to use the stamps, well I think the trick is to press down hard when stamping. Very hard. The usual advice is not to stamp too hard as you get a blurred image if your stamp has fine lines. Well with the Silhouette-machine produced stamps  there aren't any fine lines and the stamp surface is flat. I found holding the block on the corners, then putting my thumb in the middle seemed to get the best result. To get an even more solid impression, reinking the stamp and stamping it again over the top of the first image can work.

But what if I want fine lines I hear you ask. Well the Silhouette Portrait or Cameo can hold a pen - no need to mess around with stamps.  See  http://www.silhouetteschoolblog.com/2014/05/31-silhouette-sketch-pen-project.html.

In the next post I will show how I made a stamp from a medieval tile design.