Put Your Stamp on Your Home: Decorating with stamps

Decorating your home is such a personal activity. You may prefer a home that showcases the latest high street home trends, or you might get a jumble of retro furnishings from eBay. Whatever you do, though, you want to make sure that your home is a unique reflection of your personality and taste, and sometimes customisation is the only way to do it.

Luckily, there is one easy way to really put your stamp on your home: stamps. Simply put, you need only to cover a stamp in some kind of ink and apply it to fabric, paper and other materials.

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Decorating with stamps

The process of coating a stamp with fabric paint and pressing onto some sort of fabric is the basis of many stamp-based crafting projects. Curtains, tablecloths, cushion covers and napkins can all be personalised with fabric paint and steps.

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One of the most creative way crafters online use stamps is on tablecloths, to indicate place settings. Take a stamp with straight lines or a soft curve, and use the stamp to make a circle or square at each place setting. You can first trace the circle or square onto the tablecloth with a pencil, if doing it free hand seems a bit daunting.

If you don’t want to personalise fabric – if you don’t use a lot of fabric or aren’t a big sewer – you can still personalise many things around your home. Take a large round candle and a large stamp, and using a roller, apply a light layer of ink onto the stamp. Rock the stamp around the candle. This will leave a unique impression on regular old candles.

You can also apply stamps to serviettes, wooden picture frames, vases, ceramic pots and just about anything else. Just make sure the ink you use is appropriate for the material you will be printed it on.

Stamp aesthetics

These days, stamps come in all shapes and sizes, and the paints and inks you can use come in all shades and formulations. Because of that, you can find stamps and colours to suit all kinds of themes and tastes.

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The picture above uses a couple of fabrics and stamps to create a modern, Far East Asian-inspired piece of art, which you could recreate and use as wall decoration. But the image below seems to reference the Indian subcontinent, simply through the use of an Indian-style stamp and many different colours.

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Making stamps

You can buy stamps at any craft supply store and many art supply shops, but in fact, you probably have great things to convert into stamps just laying around your home. Online, crafters use potatoes, rubbers at the end of pencils, buttons, sea shells, leaves and even loo roll tubes as stamps. Sometimes they use these bits and bobs as they are, and sometimes they carve specific shapes into them.

If you want to carve out your own stamp, you can do this in a great many ways. You can print out or draw an image, then use that as a template on the material you are using as a stamp. If you are going to use a potato, you can also use cookie cutters to carve out unique stamps. Just cut the potato in half, then press the cookie cutter deeply into the potato. Pull it out, and carve out the parts that you don’t want to be the stamp. Then coat the potato in ink or paint and stamp away.

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The great thing about stamping is that there are no rules. If you just apply a bit of creativity to it, anything can be stamped or can become a stamp. Just play around and enjoy the process, then step back and admire how you have put your stamp on your home by decorating with stamps.