tests of Silhouette stamp material stamps with various stamp pads

wounded stamp

black ink from Starter Kit

I tested some small stamps with various stamp ink pads I had around.  When I cleaned them they tended to slide off the block. I haven't lost any yet but its something to be aware of. The stamps are about 3cm across and they came from the centres of a few flower cut files from the Silhouette Store.To the left is one that was affected by the alignment problem, I stopped the machine and moved the material. On the impression you can just see the tear. They are stamped onto ordinary printer paper using the supplied blocks or similar ones. You also see a normal clear stamp for comparison, chosen because the reindeer body is a reasonably sized flat inked area. The Ranger Tim Hotz Distress ink is, well, distressed all right. The ink was in spots on the stamp but spread into the paper a bit. The Sharpie, as you see, did not spread into the paper. I suppose it could be measles on a get well card! The Versacolor pigment cube didn't come out too badly.
*** Update - the Sharpie was a bad idea - the stamp kept some red colour which then came off on my embossing ink pad.

brand new Versacolor cube

red Sharpie marker

Distress ink pine

The flower on the box of the Silhouette Stamping Starter Kit

I made the flower which features on the box. I didn't resize it - it came out larger than the largest acrylic block supplied with the kit. As mentioned it went off the edge of the stamp material as well, you can see the missing bit on the top right-hand corner. The stamp has some of the black ink left on it so you can see it. there is actually another stamp on the back of the block in the picture but it barely shows up. The flower stamp is in one piece but the one on the back is in many small bits so I didn't want to remove it just yet.

making a stamp with Silhouette's stamp material on my Silhouette Portrait machine

 I have a Silhouette Portrait cutting machine and the Silhouette Stamping Starter Kit.  I couldn't fine much info on what stamp pads work best with it, so I decided to try some out. Do not confuse this with the Silhouette Mint stamp making machine and its materials, I don't have one of those.
First a few words about the stamp material.  It is a sort soft flexible plasticy stuff, possibly silicone. Its a bit like the stuff silicone baby bottle teats used to be made of. It is a bit like the stuff clear acrylic stamps are made off, but it is much softer and not quite as clear.

Anyway, there is a tutorial on how to use it here at the Silhouette School blog, so I'm not going to present one here.  The comments are worth reading too. http://www.silhouetteschoolblog.com/2014/09/silhouette-stamp-material-tutorial-10.html

 Silhouette recommend that cuts in the stamp material are 1/16 of an inch apart, that is about 1.5mm here in Australia. So much craft information is from the US that its hard to use metric for everything as I would like to.  This width means you can't do small writing or anything like that.

I decided to make the flower that's on the box of the Starter Kit first. The box  has a somewhat misleading picture on it, I mean the inked-up black flower on the grid on the left. The one to the right is a better indication of what the stamp is like.
I made the flower but there was some problem with alignment and one side of the flower was not cut. When I find out why I will post the information here.

I found the stamped image a bit disappointing, that led me to do some experiments and gave me something to blog about.