we just got our new business cards finished and i have some mixed emotions.  i’m very proud of them.  they look  and feel great. but…  well, lemme start from the beginning.

i decided to do things a bit differently this time, so i decided to take the vellum we always used for our other business cards and cut them square instead of the traditional business card size.  they will still fit into a wallet, but will stand out a bit.  and vellum just feels like a million dollars when you touch it.  and instead of having them printed, i had some rubber stamps custom made and hand stamped them instead of the usual method of having them printed.  if you decide to look up best business card designs, you will see that some of the coolest new designs are being hand stamped.  it gives an edgy, artistic, rustic, distressed, unique, “i wanna take this with me and keep it in my wallet” kind of vibe.

i found a company that i felt comfortable with that didn’t tolerate any mistakes (straight from their website, see their “about us” page) simon’s stamps and asked if i could order these in true rubber – unmounted.  it was not a problem, so i sent over my art work and had them at my front door in no time flat.

i also order some stamp pads and ink, and the colors i chose were from color box and the pigment choices were fresh green and sky gray.  i found after stamping that the gray was lighter than i had intended, so i mixed a little black ink in to darken a bit.

the big problem with doing a two color stamp is alignment.  it doesn’t have to be perfect.  in fact, that’s kind of the beauty of a hand stamped anything, the slight imperfections.  but trying to stamp multiple times would end up with a lot of waste.  so i looked up “rubber stamp alignment tool” and this thing called the stamp-a-ma-jig kept popping up.  this thing was cool, but would not work for this situation.  so i brain stormed it awhile, till i came up with what you see below.  i got some 1/4 inch red wood and cut it to the dimensions i desired, installed a hinge and a handle, i chose some that are used for drawers that i picked up on sale at lowes.  i found that i also needed something under the stamping area to raise the area a bit so that when the stamp was pressed it was completely flat, so i installed in some plastic that i re-purposed from an old 3 ring binder.  i had installed an “l” shaped guide, but i found that my stamp was slightly over-sized and would hit the guide and not leave a good clean impression, so i removed it.

after i stamped a few, i began to have trouble remembering exactly why i did them this way.  they look cool, but now i’ve got to stamp 500 of them!  why did i do it this way?!  i have no idea now.  maybe i’ll just stamp a few to give to some special clients to pass out, or maybe i’ll hire my niece to knock it out for me.  i don’t know.  i didn’t even do it one color, i had to do two, and then of course, i couldn’t do just one side, i had to make it front AND back!

so there you have it.  and now that i have the stamps, i can stamp anything i want to.  paper bags, etc.  maybe i should have stayed with one color, but i just couldn’t resist.  it just wouldn’t have looked as cool.  i may change my mind after awhile and break down and just order them already finished, but for now, it is what it is.  thanks for listening in.  i guess when you want things done a certain way, custom is the only way to do it.  i guess it’s just the creative streak in me.

oh, well.  they are done and they look cool.  what do you think?  anybody wanna help me stamp a bunch of cards?!