Stamps ala John

So if you're like me you make soap. Well...if you're "like" me you make LOTS of things...soap being one of the MANY things. :) AND...If you're "like" me you like toys. Lots of shiny and fun toys. hehe....I am forever shopping for new and useful toys to be creative with.
Let's see this is 2009 now....so.... it's been more than 5 years since I asked my dad to make my first soap mold. I had purchased many a mold before I asked him to make one. It was a log. My dad made about 15 molds for me in between the molds he made for customers and friends.
Then John took over. hehehehe....SUCKER! Depending on how one looks at it I suppose. John took over making the soap molds in early '08 and hasn't stopped. It's quite impressive to watch him work. I keep throwing him curve balls and he is right there throwing the product back in my face. Just last night, as we were getting covered in splinters from the plywood sheets we were ripping down, I saw a leftover piece and it clicked in my wee pea brain....DING! I have this awesome, little log that he made for me a couple of months ago. It's kewl. A pain in the arse to line but so fun to use. This "extra" piece of plywood would double the size of said mold and make it MUCH easier to line and work with. YEAH me....When time permits I shall have a new double row log. 8o))) Last night we also cut down a 10 ft PVC pipe for some round molds. I have a new batch of shaving soap curing now. 8o)))))
So why am I chatting about soap molds if the topic is stamps??? Well....erm...'cause I can! That's why. Geeez....can't a girl get off track once in a while!?
So John is a creative sort of guy and is always thinking of new ideas. A few years ago he thought of a product that required the use of a cnc machine. Well....anyone who knows anything about them knows they are NOT cheap (even the CHEAP ones aren't cheap). John did his thing and bought one. It's adorable.... in a geeky sort of way. He got really kewl software and played with it. Made mockups of the product he wanted to make and then started looking at soap stamps. Hehehehehehehehe......SCORE! He knew I wasn't happy with the stamps I had purchased and wanted to make me smile. Not to mention make some money to pay for the new shop we loaded our basement with. We have spent, literally, HUNDREDS if not thousands of hours working on stamp ideas and concepts. I really don't feel bad for asking him to make a stamp because........I love to see the twinkle in his eye when he has come up with an easier way to produce something magical. It's fun to watch him get frustrated with the software. To see him get irritated and then run the program and have the stamp come out better than expected is really kewl. I'll be browsing, chatting, making soap or whatever and hear his big ol' feet come up the stairs and he'll have this little plate in his hand and say "wanna see"!? Well DUH! We learned, not soon enough, to have a batch of soap just for him. Of course it looks like it has some sort of disease or something with being rebatched and all. It REALLY is ugly. I'll watch him go through the motions of stamping and then see the image on the bar and a smile fills the room. It's so fun. Of course I better have the camera close by because he loves loves loves to get pics of his art. I have hundreds of pics of stamped soap. I made a folder on flickr just for his stamps. When time permits we WILL be adding new stamps to Etsy. But....custom stamps always come first and those take up a lot of our "free" time....what little there is.

Folks always ask me about using our stamps and the best way to go about it. This is when I type....there is no set in stone method for stamping soap. Some use presses in order to get consistant pressure all around the stamp for the ideal impression. I say......NOT! To me..the whole idea is to stamp it old school style with a mallet and have complete control of it all. I have a few choice tools in my "bag o' tricks" that I absolutely can not live without.


Here is a small sampling of my "necessities". We have
a "fresh" cup o' joe with a touch too much creamer
a mallet (can be found at your local Lowes or Home Depot)
a wood block (I'm not kewl enough to have my stamps mounted on finishd oak blocks so I use these instead)
a brush of sorts....


Again you see the important things. My stamps are not blocked. Well the wurly curly is but that's all. Tooth picks help to get the stuck soap from around the smaller crevices of the stamps. The block is used on top of the stamp for stamping. The brush....I use it to coat the stamps with cooking spray. You would NOT believe how much easier it is to stamp with a lubed stamp. DON'T LAUGH...TRY IT!


Check it.....A can of OFF BRAND cooking spray, tooth picks, a brush (this is a highlights brush from Sallys ONLY because we had it on hand), you can use ANY type of brush. My "not playing around" mallet, COFFEE (always have coffee) and a selection of stamps. The basket is used to house my stamps, brush, toothpicks and block. And I have had to permanently mark the block with the word MINE on all sides. When folks stamp soaps these block go missing. Grrrrr.....


The Smiley was originally made to go wirh the beer soap I make. Then we got into beer with a backward R. I LOVE this stamp. It's definitely one of my favorite stamps. I use this one a lot.




My anhoki stamp is simple but I love it.



This kissing hand is another of my favorite stamps. Have you ever read the book The Kissing Hand? My Camryn's kindergarten teacher read it to the class on the first day and it was so very sweet. I had been wanting to make a kissing hand stamp for a while and never got around to it. As luck would have it I had a person come to me with a custom stamp request. One of the stamps she wanted had a kissing hand as part of the image. YEAH! That got the ball rolling for the idea of this stamp and the rest as they say........


The I love U stamp is an original by me. I made it because I thought it would be kewl for wedding soap, Valentines Day, Mothers Day, whatever. Simple and to the point.


No matter how many times a person tells you that you CAN NOT stamp salt bars....I am here to prove them WRONG! You CAN stamp salt bars and I do it all the time. You have to do it pretty soon after cutting them and they DO still need to be on the softer side. HOWEVER... you CAN do it too SOON. It comes with practice and you have to know your recipe too.


This DSM stamp is another fave. I love the Georgia font and how "phosisticated" it makes soap look. "Phosisticated is a vocabulary word that can be found under sophisticated in the dictionary. 8O) I cut this batch and let it set for about 6 hours and then stamped. This is a HARD batch so it worked out pretty well.


My NIG Kahuna salt bar stamped with the whurly curly. Gotta be quick with salt bars or they will crumble and crack.


What man doesn't think he is a "stud"? EXACTLY. Between this and beer....what oculd be better?!


This stamp was made for a challenge I did not long ago. Being a military brat we traveled a lot. We lived in Italy from '83 to '86. AWESOME!!!! I designed this stamp to reflect one of my favorite countried.

Well since you've seen the CORRECT ways to stamp soap let's now look at WRONG ways to stamp soap. This can happen to ANYONE at any time. Don't go thinking you are immune to mis-stamping. NO one is immune to a mis-stamp. You waited too long and the bar got too hard. You stamped too soon and the soft soap came out when the stamp did......Anything is possible. Get used to the idea that it can and will happen to you. This can ALSO happen if your stamp is too detailed and delicate.


This soap was too soft. It was only about a day after if was cut....this is a cpop batch with a 40% water discount.


Same exact thing with this one. Although I have since learned that this particular batch just doesn't like to be stamped. Period. It is a beer batch with a Sandalwood fragrance oil blend. This unfortunate mishap has happened twice. I won't be stamping this soap.


Hahahaha...OK....This is a double layer batch. Hard as a rock too. I ended up stamping this batch two days after it came out of the oven. It was good and hard and the problem was with the STAMPER and not the stamp or the soap. I tried to go back and stamp once it had set for a bit and misaligned it. NOT pretty.

TRICKS we have learned to make the stamping process go smoothly are.....

1) ALWAYS have a clean stamp. If you have soap crumbs on your stamp take a scrub brush and scrub them off or lightly wash the stamp. When I say LIGHT I mean LIGHT.
-Turn the water to a drizzle and barely get it wet.
-Use a scrub brush to lightly remove the soap from the stamp.
-IF you can't get the soap from the crevisses then you grab a tooth pick and pick it out.
-Don't get aggressive with your stamp because it could get aggressive with you and break. We don't want that.

Once it is clean take a towel and pat dry....yes..all the way.

2) Now you want to take that lovely brush of yours and spray a tiny bit of spray on both sides. THIS is what you use to get the oil on the stamp. You do NOT want to spray directly on the stamp. Brush the spray on evenly. Spraying directly on the stamp will result in a buildup of grossness and make the stamp too slippery to acutally stamp the soap. It could also damage the block.

3) Place the stamp in the desired location and grab your mallet.

4) Tap lightly and see what you've done. If you need to stamp more you can. You can't remove the impression once it's done but you can always restamp. It's like measure twice and cut once.....kinda.

5) I always have a toothpick close by. If you have impressed the soap and you have soap "boogers" left behind you can use the toothpick to remove them. This is also good for the more delicate stamps. You can carefully make the impression larger. IF you are brave enough.

6) Once my soap impression is to my liking I always take a paper towel and brush across the top to get whatever might be floating around off of it.

Now stamp away.

These are steps we have found that work for us. These steps won't work for everyone. And we have found the more delicate a stamp is in its design the more likely you are to have soap pullout. One thing I had to remember is while it looks good on paper or on a rubber stamp it may not and probably won't look good as a soap stamp. Delicate design and soap stamps do not go hand in hand. I've found that out the hard way. Soap stamps are very much like tattoos.... in my experiece...the bigger the better. Simple really is best. Take a look at John's "portfolio" of soap stamps if you'd like to challenge that theory.

Stamps Ala John

Folks ask me if these stamps are really "that" hard to make. I wouldn't say they are hard to make but they ARE time consuming. When someone sends us artwork it's not just "OK...let's make this into a stamp and have it ready tomorrow". SO doesn't work like that. When we get the artwork we have to make sure it is BIG enough to work with. We need artwork that is roughly 5 to 8 times larger than the end result will be. This way John can do what he needs to do to make the stamped impression LOOK like the original image provided. This often means hours in Photoshop...

A) Filling in pixelated artwork

B) Making lines thicker so you can ACTUALLY see them in the impression

C) Redesigning the concept because it just won't work in the space provided.

D) Spacing words or lines apart a bit more so the bit will actually go through the lines of the image.

This is a funny one. I am learning how to spot images that will work AT FIRST GLANCE. When I get one that doesn't work I have to contain myself because I also thought EVERY image could be made into a soap stamp not too long ago.

E) You name it and we have attempted it in order to make a design work. But there are also designs that just flat out won't work. After getting repeat migraines and going cross-eyed we can spot them from the start.

This is why we ask that you do not request we design your stamp.

You KNOW what it is that you want.

You KNOW what you want the font to look like and you know what the overall concept should look like.

If you could either draw it out on paper and then scan it into a JPEG, PNG, BMP or related file extention and email it to us it would make things go much much smoother.

Telling us what word you want in a specific font is the same thing as asking us to design the stamp. That WILL add an additional $15 to the cost of your stamp simply because we prefer the customer to provide us with the artwork and we work from it.

Also...We do not have Microsoft Word. We use Open Office. Not really compatible which is why we like to work with JPG or similar file extensions.

We would like to have an image we can view without having to download. With all the viruses spreading like wildfire one can't be too careful.

Here is the blurb we have on our website and in the policies section of our Etsy page.

STAMPS STAMPS STAMPS!!!
PLEASE email me HERE for more information. I can not give pricing until the image has been sent and we see how much work is required. Thanks!<<<

Let's talk about stamps. Shall we?! So you heard we make custom and "standard offering" stamps and want one of your own. GOOD for you. Here's how you do it.

Standard stamps are anywhere from $13.95 to $19.95 depending on the size and detailing involved. Standard offerings can currently be found only on our Etsy . They are limited due to a huge amount of CUSTOM orders but will be expanded when time allows. 8o)

CUSTOM stamps are so so fun. We will GLADLY do a custom stamp for you. However...we do NOT design the stamp for you. That is your job. 8o) They start at $29.95 but may be more depending on the amount of work we have to do to it. The price of your stamp will go up if after you have approved your artwork and it is milled you decide changes need to be made. The first remill is an additional $10 and each additional milling will be in increments of $15. PLEASE communicate fully with us and understand the stamp design process before we mill it for you. This will save time, supplies and your funds.

We need quite a few things from You >>BEFORE<<>

1) Length and Width of your soap bar

2) H-U-G-E JPEG, GIF, PNG, PDF, BMP, TIF file of your image. We prefer a size of 5X7 or larger to avoid pixelation. Please be sure to not take a very small image and BLOW it up at this does not prevent pixelation but enhance it. We will resize it to the stamp size as we go. We also request that you, the buyer, design your own stamp before asking us to make one.

3) Tell us what the EXACT name of the font is and where we can find it for FREE IF we might need it to rework your image for any reason.

4) Give us an idea of how much space you wish your stamp to cover. Often times images are not well represented in a smaller stamp but an idea of what you have in mind is most helpful.
Larger is better. SERIOUSLY..SIZE DOES MATTER! The larger your stamp image the better it will look on your soap bar. However, we don't want to have it so large that is buldges out the sides of the soap bar so please be reasonable.

5) Be reasonable with the image you want for your stamp. The more detailed images may look great in a rubber stamp but not so great in a soap stamp. If you have an image that is highly detailed and requires a lot of impressing it will not work. For instance....if you wish to have a stamp of a daisy it is often better to do an outline and then color the inside with mica or soap paints. The fewer lines and impressions you have the better the outcome.

6) One thing everyone must remember is my DH does have an 8 to 5 job where he is not working on stamps or soap molds. This is what we call "paying the mortgage and providing food for the chillen's". He makes the molds, stamps, cutters and whatever else is requested in his off hours so it is possible he might be backed up from time to time. Please understand and appreciate this when placing an order with us. We will do our very best to be up front and honest with you regarding the turn-around of your item but life does happen and sometimes things are delayed a bit.

7) PLEASE have patience with us. Patience and communication are two key ingredients to your receiving a perfect for you soap stamp.

After all of that....my fingers are done. I hope this was informative, helpful and ammusing.

I will be taking pictures of John making a stamp from scratch on the cnc machine and will post those when time permits.

Ciao.