 Hey guys, okay, so Cindy's challenge this month is to create your own stamps. So I'm actually going to do a little video that I actually haven't done this. It's been a while since I've done any of this where I actually carved my own stamp by hand which I've done before. This is a stamp carving jig and this lip sits on the edge of the table and my carving block fits in this little notch right here. So I can carve on it away from me and nothing slides and there's less chance of me gouging my hand. I got this on Amazon. If I can find it I'll try to remember to put a link. This is a block of stamp carving, I don't know what they call it, it's just MooCarve. It's a carving block. It's like a block of rubber. You can also get these carving pieces of like linoleum to carve into and you can also get these which are actually a block of wood with some linoleum on the top of it to also carve into to just make different kinds of stamps. So we're going to use this one and the first thing I'm going to do is draw my design out with a Sharpie and there's a design I've been thinking about actually for a while that I kind of wanted to do which looks something like that and I just think that would be really interesting stamped onto a art journal page like over a multicolored background in black ink. So that's a good basic design and that's about as big as I can go on this stamp carving block. So now I have a bunch of carving tools with varying shaped sharper blades to basically remove the rubber that I don't want to stamp with. The first thing I'm going to do is trim my block because it's too big not with that one because that one's I just grab my Xacto knife. Now we're going to start removing material. I'm going to put my reading glasses on so I can see what I'm doing and I'm going to start with sort of a medium-sized curved tip blade this one. Now these aren't expensive you know where I got these? Daiso the Japanese dollar store so don't spend a lot of money on them. So I'm going to go around the outside of the design first. The idea is to remove the material that I don't remove the part of the design I don't want to stamp with. This is really not as hard as you probably think it is. Okay so I'm going to keep carving I'm going to speed forward through the process and I will be right back. But these are some scissors I think these are for like doing the little trees what do you call that the little Japanese gardening. I think I got these at like Harbor Freight or something. I also have some fancier ones like this these are from Stampin' Up they're full of glue but they're kind of the same kind of scissors these are oops there we go so these are great for carve cutting up this kind of rubber carving block and the only trick to this is to keep your fingers out of the way which is why this jig is handy if I got schmutz on my stamping pad. Okay if you you know slip with the block or you slip with the tool you know make sure you're going this way and not this way or that way and that's why it's good to have this jig because if you need to which I didn't really need to that's too much this time but if you need to you can brace it up here and carve that way and it's not going to go far and you're not going to cut yourself this is a safety thing and you know making sure that the only tools that I take the caps off of are the ones that I'm using that's another thing that I do so you saw at the end where I stamped the stamp with black ink so that I could see the design and see what parts if there were any that I needed to take away I kind of I really like the look of these hand carved stamps when they're done and this one I was right is going to look really great on painted backgrounds this is going to make a great embellishment you also can use these kind of stamps with black paint if you brayer out a little bit of black paint onto a flat smooth surface like a piece of plastic or a small jelly plate then you can use it as kind of an ink pad to stamp in the paint and then stamp on the paper so that works too that's it for right now I hope you enjoy Cindy's challenge for this month if you haven't seen her video yet I'm going to put a link in the description below go over and watch it and that's it for right now don't forget to like share and subscribe if you could and support my channel if you will by shopping over at the Etsy shop the links for that and all of my Facebook groups and all of that stuff are in the description below there's an address for happy mail all of that stuff and the most important thing of course go out and have a great day maybe carve yourself a new stamp do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later bye guys