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Unmounted Rubberstamps

Oh this is my favorite. Ok what are unmounted rubberstamps? They are just the pieces of rubber with the image and no padding or wood mount. Many places online, sell unmounted for half the price of the mounted stamps. You can buy single images or entire sheets of images for a lot cheaper than mounted images.

How do you work with unmounteds?
You find a mounting system that works for you. There are a couple of different ones that I am familiar with, there may be others but these are the ones I have some knowledge of…

Vinyl Clings. I believe you can buy cling sheets and attach them to your rubberstamps. I have never tried this, but have gotten a few clear vinyl rubberstamps and they work great.
Halos (Velcro). I started out using this, but found it difficult to use very small images or alphabet letters, as they wouldn’t stay clung tightly to the Velcro and regularly fell off. Worked fine for large images, but I do a lot of alphabet letters, so it wasn’t working for me.
Padding only. You can take your sheet of rubber and attach it to a sheet of padding and then trim out your images. Peel the backing off your padding and you are good to go. I have a couple of these and they work fine.
Aleene’s tack it over and over. This is my method of choice. Now keep in mind this doesn’t work well will all companies rubber. I have rubber from Leave Memories and Rusty Pickle and both of them do NOT work well using this method. Most of my unmounted stamps are from Club Scrap and Club Stamp and this method works absolutely perfect for them. Here is how to do it:

Flip rubber over so the backside is up.
Squeeze a little bit of glue onto the back side, spread around the rubber using a foam paint brush. I only put enough glue on to leave a very thin white coating on the back of the rubber. Less is better, you can always add more if need be.
Let this dry until you no longer see white, I generally leave it over night.
Now it will be fairly sticky, I usually stick it to my hand a couple of times to make it not quite so sticky.
Now is time to cut out your images. I use a pair of non-stick scissors by Tonic. But if you do not have non-stick scissors you can use regular scissors, just rub them on some embossing ink and that will keep them from getting too sticky. If they get all gummy, you can use UN-DO to remove the goo. I trim out the images fairly close to the image but not too close. I do not want the edge showing up when I stamp my image, so I cut close enough to ensure that.
Now I store my images in a 3 ring binder. I put a piece of cardstock inside a page protector (to make the page protector stay firm, otherwise when you get a bunch of stamps on it, it may bend). Then I stick my images to that page protector. So in looking at my 3-ring binder on the right hand side I have the rubber pieces, and on the left is an image of the rubber, so I can quickly glance at what I have. Other folks use CD cases (standard size not the ultra thin ones) for storing some of the unmounted rubber, it just sticks to the case itself. Then they store all the CD’s in a CD holder by theme or such.

So that is about it, other than if you do not have padding permanently on your rubber, I recommend doing your rubberstamping on a foam pad (like a mouse pad) or even an old magazine, just something that has a little give in it. This will allow you to get a much cleaner image when you stamp it.
Debbie Weller

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