From the sample negative. There's a "happy birthday", the numbers 1,2 and 3, "handmade by", a little Christmas ornament and a heart with the words "home sweet home" in the center. So, I used the negative and one of the gel packs, followed the directions and made all of those stamps!
I cut them apart and used some cling vinyl and printed out a little Home Sweet Home" sentiment. It was adorable! And the cling vinyl is washable; as I said yesterday, these gel packs don't make stamps that are sticky on the front so you either have to glue them to the acrylic or use some sort of binder. The cling vinyl worked nicely for me and it's washable which makes it reusable.
The only downside of this is the smell of the gel. After the stamp is made, you have to cut the pack apart and get rid of all of the gel that didn't harden and do a thorough wash of the stamp itself to remove all of the excess gel (if you don't do this, during the final step, the hardening, this remaining gel will affect the finished stamp). It's awful! Brian mentioned it when he walked into the kitchen as I was rinsing off the gel. The finished stamps have a residual odor to them, which I sure hope goes away with airing out.
So, now that I have something I really, really want to do, that will be my carrot. (Looks over at the growing pile of paperwork.) Next on the list is to make my own negatives so then I can make truly custom stamps.
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