Hello everyone,
The day has finally come! What day is that? You might ask... the day our custom metal stamp came in the mail! Today's blog is focused on metal stamping; an art that was a bit of a mystery to me until I did a little (and I mean a little) research. Of course Ashley and I haven't thrown ourselves into metal stamping full-tilt, we were looking for some kind of branding piece for our jewelry. This was exactly what we were looking for. A very big thanks goes out to Donald at Tinkertools (http://www.etsy.com/people/TINKERTOOLS). He was able to custom craft a metal stamp with the yaylove flower on it.
Our adventure begins with a bit of online research and tutorials. We then pulled out a heavy hammer, our jewelry anvil, a cutting matt and the beautiful little custom stamp.
The process:
1. Place cutting matt on a counter or a solid surface (not your glass coffee table).
2. Place anvil on cutting matt with metal tag on anvil.
3. Hold the metal stamp close to the base and place it on top of the metal tag.
4. Position the metal stamp on metal tag and hold.
5. While somehow plugging your ears, hit the top of the metal stamp as hard as you can with the hammer and hope that you still have all your fingers.
6. Repeat step 5 twice more.
7. Remove the metal stamp from metal tag et voilà! An awesome yaylove tag ready to brand our jewelry with.
8. Optional: rub metal tag with ink or acrylic paint, then wipe off (we wanted to keep the impression clean, so we avoided doing this, but may explore in the future).
It took exactly 3 tags until we finally got the hitting process down, and then we were on a metal-tag-making role! KABAM! More lovely little tags!
Hope you enjoyed the post, until next time, my friends!
Kristy
