Actually I carved 5 of 'em!  With Stampin' Up!®'s brand-new product called "Undefined".  (So-called, because the chunk of rubber in the kit is "undefined" until you carve it into something of definition, of course. Very clever, those Stampin' Up! people.)

Ok, so here's how it all went down:  (Queue the harp music here while the image of today fades out and slowly morphs into about 17 years ago…..)  I discover the concept of decorative rubber stamps at a Stampin' Up! party I attend.  I'm wow'ed, of course (who wouldn't be?), and especially impressed with two things:  1)  The speed with which the demonstrator cranked out 3 different gorgeous papercrafted projects one after the other in a single sitting, and 2) A method of "creating art" without actually BEING an artist. (I'm not one.  And if you were ever to doubt me about that, my Grandma F. would certainly concur. I can copy, mind you, but I can't draw or paint anything original to save my life.)  So I jump all over this Stampin' Up! thing, and 17-1/2 happy years pass.  (Fast forward to July 18, 2013, Salt Lake City.) Now, here I am sitting at my 18th consecutive Stampin' Up! Convention, celebrating the company's 25th anniversary with some 6000 of my closest stampin' friends, when…. wait…… WHAT IS THAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT?!?

Carving your own stamps from your OWN artwork?!?!?!?

Oh good grief! The reason I STAMP is because I can't draw, and rubber stamping allows me to make pretty things by borrowing someone ELSE'S artwork, so I can FEEL like an artist! (Picture extreme angst and head-shaking here.)

But I'll try anything once. Well, not ANYTHING actually, but you know what I mean.  But I won't necessarily try this "anything" in public if it means there's a chance of being ridiculed by my peers.  So I skip the opportunity to test it out that very night.  Give me time; give me privacy.  So………

Freshly home from Convention I order up my own "Undefined" kit and UPS drops it off about dinnertime last night.  I hem.  I haw.  I open the box and stare at its contents.  I go get something to eat.  I adjust the room temperature.  (How'd it suddenly get SO HOT in here?!?) And who ate the last of the ice cream?  I go check Facebook – and even offer up my own post admitting to my fear.  But I promise myself I WILL try this new product at least once, even if for no other reason than to share with my customers what it's all about.  'Cuz I know that lots of OTHER people are more artistically gifted then I, and THEY might be interested in this new kit, and I suppose I ought to at least know what's in it.  So finally I sit down to check it out.

The kit includes "almost" everything you need to make your own stamp(s).  I had to add a piece of scratch paper, an ordinary pencil, my Craft & Rubber scissors (did I ever mention how disappointed I was when those got retired? Thankfully, I own 6 or 7 pairs….), my black Stazon ink pad (because I chose to, not because I had to), and before the evening was over, a bandaid. (Who knew that tools sharp enough to carve rubber would also be sharp enough to pierce flesh?!?  Thankfully, nothing more than a nuisance there; whew!)

The instructions were straightforward enough – provided you can read diagrams rather than words. (If you'd rather watch a video, there's one at the bottom of this post.) The patterns included with the kit looked WAY too complex for me, so I tossed them aside and thought and thought (like the girl in the video)….. and then remembered that thank you card I've been meaning to make for a couple of months now, except my design idea has required a really cool set of arrow images, and I haven't HAD a set of arrow stamps.  Hey! Now THERE's an idea!  Maybe I could draw arrows! After all, they're just a bunch of straight lines, aren't they?

So I get down to work. Using some plain ol' yellow lined paper as a guide, I sketch out 5 different arrows with a pencil. Some fat, some skinny. Some solid, some open-centered. Some short; some long.  Well THAT didn't take too long. (I'm impressed with myself so far.)  Next step: I flip a sketched arrow over onto the chunk of rubber and run my fingernail back and forth across the paper.  Hey, look!  A nice, sharp image transferred lickety-split onto my rubber!

I take the smaller of the 2 carving tools and trace around the outside of the image.  Not perfectly straight, but I forgive myself because afterall, this is "hand carved" and I'm not an artist anyway.  Ok, keep going…. all the way around…. all the way around. 

Next, using the larger carving tool I dig away at the remaining rubber from around the image.  Doesn't look particularly clean or pretty.  Actually it's downright messy-looking, but it seems to be working.  I grab my Craft & Rubber scissors and rough-cut the image from the remaining chunk of rubber before I spoil the unused section.  Then I mount it onto the adhesive foam layer (and trim up the edges a bit), then ink up the stamp with Stazon and stamp the arrow onto the included wood block.  (I'm instantly transported back to 1996.  Woo Hoo!  I stamped something!)  Next up – I peel off the remaining paper from the self-stick foam and slap the arrow onto the block.  Ta Da!  A rubber stamp is born!

And then 4 more arrows later I've got a whole SET of rubber stamps that are all mine!  And no one else ANYWHERE has arrow stamps just like mine!  I smile (just like the gal on the video)….. and then I go make that card that's 2 months overdue. I'm still smiling.