The Great Conversion Project

Take one love of rubber stamps, and add a crazy desire to actually start collecting awesome sets. Cut with a little bit of no space in the craft area. What does this leave? An insane project to convert all my stamps to a vinyl cling system. I suppose it's not that insane - I really don't have a lot of stamps to convert compared to some of my friends. But it's proving to be quite the process nonetheless! The little stamps are the hardest, having to make such tiny snips through the foam and rubber, argh! On the plus side, this allows me to re-trim stamps that weren't trimmed very well in the first place!

So, what is this vinyl cling system? It's genius, really. Instead of permanently mounting my stamps onto wooden blocks, I am adhering a layer of vinyl cling to the foam on the sticky side. The vinyl has enough static charge to temporarily adhere to an acrylic block. For sets like Stampin' Up that come with the rubber dies already attached to sticky foam, I just use vinyl cling. For stamps that are rubber-die-only, I use a product called EZ-Mount, which is a foam layer with adhesive on one side and vinyl on the other. I used EZ-Mount a lot for converting stamps that were wood-mounted previously, because it was easier to get the rubber off the foam than to get the rubber and the foam off the wood.

For storage, I am opting to use a binder system rather than the popular CD-case system. Most unmounted stamp sets fit nicely into a regular CD jewel case (not the slim kind), but I decided to purchase hole-punched acrylic sheets to store my stamps in a zip-up binder. I'm not sure how well this will work out in the long run, I may yet switch to CD cases as I'm already filling up my second binder.

I plan to post a tutorial on precisely how I decided to attack this project at some point. For those who are visual in nature, I have made sure that I have photographed the process from beginning to end, so it all makes sense.