When you start out, stamping products can be confusing. Here are a few tips to help you learn the basics.
The number of stamping products on the market may seem overwhelming, but you can get off to an easy start with a few basics and then build your collection over time. Choose stamps that you will be able to use on multiple projects. For example, background stamps, shapes, and alphabets.
Rubber stamps come in two forms: mounted and unmounted. Mounted rubber stamps come glued on wood or acrylic blocks. They are ready to use but are often more expensive than unmounted stamps. Unmounted rubber stamps require you to cut out the images and mount them (permanently or temporarily) before use. Wood, acrylic, and even new magnetic styles of unmounted stamps are available.
Rubber stamps are easy to purchase. It’s the inks that can be confusing for a beginning stamper.
Dye Ink:General-purpose ink great for stamping on all types of paper. It has a very quick drying time, which makes it difficult to heat-emboss. It is normally permanent and waterproof. Dye ink soaks into paper and becomes more muted as it dries. It can also bleed or feather, causing the image to lose clarity.
Pigment Ink: This is a thick ink with a slow drying time and is a good choice for heat-embossing. This ink does not soak into the paper but instead dries on the surface, producing a crisp stamped image. A heat tool speeds up the drying process. Pigment ink does not dry on coated or glossy paper.
Permanent Ink: Also known as solvent ink, which dries by evaporation. The ink is designed for stamping on nonporous surfaces such as shrink plastic, glass, metal, and transparencies. Hybrid ink shares traits with both dye and pigment inks. Like a dye ink, it dries quickly, but like a pigment ink, it produces crisp images. The result is a soft, almost muted, chalklike finish, yet the colors are rich.
