Homemade Stamps out of recycled items

Big brother and I decided that we would work together for Big Brother to MAKE Little Sister's 2nd birthday present.  Oh my gosh, can I believe she's turning two?  No I can not.

Little Sis loves making pictures, and stamping is one of her favorite mediums.  But stamps are expensive!  I've looked in thrift stores, discount stores--I pick up a few on clearance or at the dollar store now and again, but for the most part they are just out of my price range.  But I saw some ideas for cheap stamps on pinterest and decided that it would make a good project for the boy and me.  Below, he's giving the finished product a try (I let him make a few for himself with our leftover supplies).

The best part is, these stamps are practically free!  I bought one package of foam stickers at the Dollar Tree, they have tons of stickers inside so it goes a long way.  The key is, of course, that the foam stickers are thick, so the image stands up from the background it is stuck to.  The pack that I bought included music notes, a guitar, cello, violin, flute, saxophone, trumpet, maracas, and...a few cacti.  Of course.  We also had some leftover foam heart stickers from Valentine's Day, so we used those too.  The rest of the supplies are lids from various containers (I found that water bottle size lids were too small for most of the stickers--gallon milk jug and juice lids were the best size, and we also had a few random bigger lids), wine corks, and a glue gun.  Since so many stickers come in a pack, the only limit to how many you can make is how many lids and wine corks you've managed to hold on to.  We made about 20.

Well...free if you don't count all the wine we had to drink.

 First, the boy chose all the stickers he wanted to use and stuck them down on the washed lids.

 

Very serious business

 I applied the hot glue to the wine corks,

Ewww, sorry about the double-jointed-thumb pic.

then centered them on the back of the lid. 

We also had these weird leftover pieces of wood from making a new banister.  I held on to them months ago, thinking they might be good for something.  I used these when I ran out of wine corks, although maybe that was just the universe telling me I needed to drink more wine.

And that's all there was to it!  The boy gave them a trial run, which is when I realized that it was a good thing that I hadn't made any alphabet stamps.  The backwards music notes will probably irk me a little, but the kids won't mind.

 

The stamps are pretty easy to use, and while they do wear out eventually (we made some of these to use in our Valentines as well, so I've seen how they handle long-term), the good news is that those packs of Dollar Tree foam stamps come with lots of repeated designs, so when a stamp starts getting raggedy you just peel it off and apply a new one!

I let the boy do the whole trial run, and he likes to twist'n'stamp, so that's why some images don't appear clearly.  But we're both happy with the results!  We're going to supplement the gift with a rainbow stamp pad and a pad of paper. 

More to come soon on the gift that I made for the girl, and on the party itself--we've been having fun getting crafty for that, too.  She is so excited for her Owl Party--she talks about it all the time!  "Owl Party!  Owl Cake!" Don't worry, I'll show you!