Saturday, March 19, 2011

Alphabet Potato Stamps Tutorial


I found a Martha Stewart stamp pad on sale about a month ago and I couldn't resist buying it, even though I don't own any stamps. For my solution I took a page from my childhood memories and decided to make potato stamps! Personally, my favorite kind of stamps are letter stamps, so I decided to transform one large potato into a variety of letters. Very cheap, easy and (admittedly) fun! Also, because I thought of the few things I wanted to spell before making the stamps, I only used a third of the potato. To make your own, here is what you will need:
A large potato (or several), cookie cutters and a small knife
You can also use other things to carve out your stamps. Just look around and be creative! I ended up using some icing tips in addition to these items. Now to start making your stamps! The first thing is to  decide how big you want your stamps to be. Because I decided to make letters, I wanted mine fairly small. Take your knife and cut the potato in half or in thirds (depending on your size preference). Next, cut the curved edges so your potato pieces are as rectangular as possible. Then, just cut into smaller rectangular pieces, making them as big or small as you like. Once your pieces are cut, you can start carving out your stamps! Because I made my pieces long and thin, I was able to carve a stamp shape on both ends of my potato piece. I'm sure you could also carve shapes into all four sides if you'd like to as well! I found that cookie cutters were the easiest and most useful for carving, especially for carving curvy shapes! In the picture below, I used the leg of my giraffe cookie cutter to make my "O". One thing that I somehow forgot while carving my letters is to make sure you carve the mirror image of the letters. As you can see in my picture, I originally carved my "N" incorrectly, but I was able to easily chop off the incorrect "N" and carve out my new one :)
After all of your stamps are carved, you are ready to stamp! Here are a few of my stampings:
I am planning on having some more fun with these stamps as they should keep in the fridge for about a week! I hope you try this on your own and I would love to see your pictures if you do! As always, thanks for stopping by :)

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