| We really enjoyed this craft for school aged children. Taking the idea that God is with us day and night we used stamps to decorate a day / night image. The images I used for each stamp were drawn freehand, but the background image is available as a jpeg at the end of the post. |
 |
|
The stamp holder is made from a strip of card 4 inches long. mark out and score the area as illustrated.
|
 |
once you have folded the shape attach a small piece of double sided tape on the inside of one of the end pieces and attach the handle. Dependant on the strength of your tape you may want to tape round the handle too. I find electrical tape works expectational well for this. |
|
Cut out the desired shape from craft foam (funky foam). you can do this as one piece or many little ones. Don’t worry about being too exact. |
|
Place another piece of double sided tape on the stamp area and fix your stamp on. You can glue it but this works well and while allowing you to re-adjust and you don’t have to wait for it to dry! |
|
Your stamp is now ready to use. make as many as you wish, my list was : Sun, Moon, Stars, Cloud, Tree trunk, Tree Leaves, Fish, Grass, Birds, and a Flower. It shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to make each stamp and they lay on their side so there is no need to leave them on the stamp pads or turn them over to find out the shape. |
|
We don’t have stamp pads, so I put a generous splodge of poster paint on some plastic coasters and covered them with felt just before the session. the paint soaks into the felt and makes a great stamp pad which has washable ink and is 100% reusable. click on the image below for the day / night template background. |
To answer the two obvious questions:
(1) Double sided sticky tape is expensive, why use it? (Answer) each stamp uses less than 5cm, it’s clean and flat and very cost effective. (2) can’t find funky foam, can’t i just use card? (Answer) Sadly no, card is formed of layers and the layers disintegrate, so you don’t get the flat image.
Word to the wise. I had a couple of boys who were as gentle with the stamps as a steam truck, luckily I had some rubber backup stamps they could play with. next time the younger once will have theirs mounted on something more solid like plastic, wood or potatoes.
