alicia & atticus: metal stamping

,so yesterday with my visit to home depot, i finally got the rest of the stuff i needed for attempting my hand at metal stamping. i saw the idea here awhile ago and finally got around to doing it. thats what my purchase at harbor freight was 2 weeks ago - i bought a metal stamping kit. it includes the alphabet / numbers and an "&". well, today i tried it. and i will tell you everything that worked and didn't work, and the things i did differently than sugardoodle (reference the link earlier in the paragraph).

first, i gathered everything i was told to get: washers (i got 3/8ths inch & 1/2 inch), stamping set (i got this set from harbor freight), and hammer. instead of a sharpie though, i bought a sample paint can of behr primer + paint, tinted black (and some of those really cheap sponge brushes).

it will paint on metal and it was less than $4. plus, the nice old man at home depot was bored and very eager to help me, so i said "sure, why not".

i also was looking at the washers thinking they were quite dingy, so luckily, while i was at home depot, i also bought a foam sanding block, 150 grit. the sander i got works on all surfaces, including metal. i'm not sure if all regular sand paper will work on metal.

so, i got to work. at first i tried stamping in my living room on carpet, on a wood board. #1 - that was really loud. it gave me a headache. and #2 - it really didn't work. the tutorial says to hammer on your garage floor, but i dont have one of those, and today is absolutely FREEZING and damp outside, so i will have to try hammering on my cement porch on another day. i found that hammering on the linoleum in my bathroom worked just fine. i'm sure it would work better on cement, but have i already mentioned it was freezing outside? i put a paper towel down under my washers to protect the linoleum.

anyways, step one - find a washer! i tried with both the 3/8th & the 1/2, and for now the size of the 1/2 is easiest to practice on.

at this point i would like to say that its really really hard to take decent pictures of anything metal with a point and shoot camera. most of these pix are without a flash, because even from far away, the flash will totally wash out anything visible in the picture, but on the flip side, my camera doesn't focus on things very well if theres no flash. i dont know why. so if the pictures are dark and/or blurry, thats why.

figure out what you want to say....and then its time to stamp!

its hard to get into the swing of stamping. i think part of it was i was stamping on linoleum. per sugardoodle, it should only take 1-2 hits with a hammer to imprint your letter. it took about 10 good wacks for me. plus, the more times you actually hit the stamp with the hammer, the better chance it will go flying out of my fingers, resulting in my growing discard pile:

but eventually, something readable will start to emerge...

cool, right?

next step. in her tutorial, sugardoodle painted in the letters with sharpies. i wanted to try something different, so i used the previously talked about behr paint. i'm showing you the difference between paint & no paint, so i only did half of the washer to show the difference.

its really just simple - paint over your letters.

i tried a bunch of different things, but the following worked best for me...i basically poked at the paint, instead of like wiping it on (try to get it in the letters), then i let it sit for a couple of minutes. then wipe it off. any paint that accidentally dries onto the washer will be removed in the next step. repeat until you are satisfied with the color. after painting, wait about 5-10 minutes, so any paint in the letters isn't accidentally removed by sanding.

can you see the difference between the "hello" (with paint) and the "world" (without paint)?

(and ignore the scratches around the bottom word - those can be lessened by sanding)

once your whole washer is painted and all the extra paint is wiped off, its time to sand. how much or little sanding depends on how shiny you want it. i think next time i'm going to buy more sanding blocks to experiment with how shiny i can get my washer. but for this project, i used my 150 grit block sander, and this is how it turned out:

shiny and pretty, right??

i'm sure theres more you can do to polish it up, but thats where i stopped.

afterwards, do whatever you want with it...all the tutorials i have seen make the washers into necklaces. since i really dont really wear them, i am waiting for inspiration as to why i really want to do metal stamping. silly, i know.

BUT, to take advantage of this totally neat process, i was able to redo my blog header (i'm sure you noticed that!)