Homemade Stamps

I've seen a wide variety of tutorials all over the web showing a very basic way to make your own stamps out of craft foam. Most recently over at Kids Matter where Angie made some wonderful butterfly life cycle stamps.

Being that we are currently observing the life cycle of frogs, I thought I would make a bunch of stamps for the frog life cycle.  The children thought it would be fun to make their own too.

First, we drew our pictures on craft foam. After you are happy with the design, use a sharp pencil and trace over your drawing to make sure that there is an indent in the foam where you have drawn.

You can either cut a shape around the design, or you can cut the design out right around the edge of your picture. (I cut my stamps out right on the edge of the shapes, the children decided to cut their creations out around the shapes.)

We glued the foam to a piece of hard cardboard with rubber cement, and added a piece of cork to the back with a hot glue gun to make our stamp.

Of course, as soon as the glue dried, we had to test out our creations.

The children always love to use the stamps and stamp pads, but it was especially fun to see their own creations! AND..... I have an awesome set of frog stamps now!

I copied my frogs from a couple of our books, and was very pleasantly surprised to see how well they turned out!

Dane was really excited about learning this technique - He made a couple of mixed up animals today, but has plans for an entire zoo of stamps!