Last night I experimented with a possible packaging design for the rubber stamps.
First I needed some new stamp designs.
So I took the logo from the banner, printed it out, and transferred it to the stamp with a xylene
blending pen. You're supposed to use toner-based printouts, but all we have in the house are inkjets, so I tried it anyway. It worked, but not well. Just enough to put in a faint image that I could carve around (I've also heard you can use a slightly-warm iron to transfer inkjet images, but I wasn't feeling adventurous enough).
Mona also made a SUNSHINE CUPCAKE text tag logo and I transferred and carved that as well. Mini letters are kind of completely evil, but I started using a harder
pink rubber stamp material, so it was much easier to get the fine details. I still couldn't rely on the lino-cutters exclusively and had to bust out the xacto here and there.
Next I asked Mona to draw something "fallish" to add to the header, so she drew a happy acorn directly on the stamp rubber with a ballpoint pen and I carved that puppy out.
Then I used some
Kiss-Off
and a rubber stamp-cleaning pad and that got most of the ballpoint ink off. It also works well for pigment ink and dye ink, though it's not perfect if the ink's been on there too long. I found it to work best when it was applied directly to the cleaning pad without any water. Once water was introduced it got foamy, but didn't seem to clean as well. I tried using
Master's Brush Cleaner as well, which works great for dried paint on brushes, but it didn't do much.
Next I tried using some
inking markers we found at the craft store that are for coloring your stamps with multiple colors. I used yellow and orange for the cupcake sun logo. It was pretty much a disaster, as you can see. There was hardly any ink transfer to the paper, it dried too quickly. I'd read about people having good results with these so I was disappointed by the actual results. I'll stick with
pigment pads.
Next I wanted to get our
store website link on the package somehow. Eventually, I'll probably print out a text logo, transfer it to a stamp and carve it out, but for now I tried some alphabet stamps we had. I like the misregistration of it all (pay no mind to the smudge I made. There is no man behind the curtain).
And to top it all off, the finished mock-up, complete with Happy Cake stamp:
for a lot of the printing on the header cards. I'm liking it lots. The stuff we originally got was kind of coarse, so today we went out and got some extra fine powder. More on how that turns out later.
Mmm. Pie.
