How to mount a carved stamp

I may eventually do a post about carving stamps but there are a ton of those out there already. This post is going to focus on mounting a stamp you've already carved.

Why do I want to mount a carved stamp? Well because I saw this wonderful picture on pinterest about how this woman used a bee stamp to stamp gold bees on her wall and I fell instantly in love. (I wish I could find the pin but for some reason I can't find it. If I stumble across it again I'll update this post.) From that moment I realized I want to decorate my kitchen in bees. Lol, I know I'm silly but I have come to really love bees lately. I love that we have honey bees and bumble bees all around our house. It is so lovely seeing them gently buzz past. They never give us any trouble. So anyway back to my kitchen. I decided I had to stamp gold bees along the trim in my kitchen.

The woman posted a link to a site she bought her bee stamp from but it was like $30 to buy a stamp that was something like 3" x 5" and that wasn't even including shipping. Plus they were based in the UK and may not even ship to the US. So I knew that particular stamp was out of the picture.

So I hunted the internet for the perfect bee stamp. I didn't want anything cartoon-ish and I didn't want anything to small. I was thinking something that looked like it was from an old scientific journal and was around the same size as her stamp but bigger would have been fine. I searched ebay, etsy, amazon, joann's fabric, and micheal's. You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to find a big bee stamp. I didn't think I was being overly picky. So I did the only thing I could decided to carve it myself. I figured it would pay off in the long run anyway and then I could make any stamp I want.

So I freehand drew the bee stamp I wanted, the size I wanted and went from there.

Here is my stamp after I carved it out of my "grey stuff". I went to our local hardware store and bought a floor sample block for .27 and some gorilla glue. Now mind you I recommend using super glue instead now. The gorilla glue expands and makes it puffy and it takes 24 hours to dry. The little tubes of super glue take less than a minute to dry and it doesn't expand. Just make sure you get a big tube because you will use a lot of it if you are doing more then one stamp.

The floor samples are perfect for stamp mounts. I feel like they look all fancy and expensive with the pretty natural wood. Although some of the floor samples are more like particle board with a foam like cushion on them. These have worked well for me too but I'm still not sure how long that particle board will hold up. Plus it's not as pretty. It does work though.

Have you ever carved a stamp before? Did you mount it? What do you think of my freehand bee? I think he's pretty cute but I could be biased. ;-)