Kick Ass Rubber Stamps

The padded manila mailer arrived and was opened to disclose a sticker reading “San Diego Craft Mafia,” three rubber stamps, and four small inkpads. The stamps are of a skull, rose and couple inches of barbed wire. All Asta Arts designs are drawn from old-timey tattoos and other gritty sources: the full-blown rose, snakes wrapped swords, nautical stars. The four ink pads—green, red, yellow, and black—are small enough that I needed to ink them by inverting the pad and placing the stamps on the carved rubber. Or you could just clap the ink pad and stamp together, like one of those wind-up toy monkeys with the cymbals. Or you could use the small stamps to create a checker board rose, or variegated strip of twisted wire. A splendid addition to the collection of any scrap booker, Asta Arts permits you to border your journal with metal thorns. And the front of mine now has a new sticker: white Sütterlein script on a shiny black rectangle, open scissors defending the dark star at the center’s heart.

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