I was a little busy yesterday evening stamping copyright dates on stamp mounts that I had indexed last week and stickybacking stamp cushion.
The copyright date is easy to explain. We have a set of stamps with our copyright notice, two (one larger and one small enough for our smallest stamps) for each year we’ve been in business. The only subtlety is that the stamps are mounted on the side of the mount. They’re intended to be stamped sideways, not up and down, while the indexing stamp and the stamp mount I’m marking are both flat on the table. That keeps the print level and a uniform distance from the bottom of the mount — pretty important when the impression is almost as big as the surface I have to stamp on.
Stickybacking cushion is less obvious. Cushion is a sponge rubber sheet that we get in 36 x 44 inch pieces. It’s too big to handle conveniently, and takes up a lot of space until we’ve used up enough of an order to put the rest under a couch. My first step in working with it is to cut it in half, to 22 x 36. At that point I can get it onto the kitchen table, if we’ve cleaned that off. We buy double-sticky tape in a big roll nine inches wide. That’s four strips of tape to cover the 36 inch width of cushion. I wash the cushion off with rubbing alcohol first to remove any mold release compound that may be on it and let it dry. Then I roll out the four strips of tape and cut them off with an X-acto knife. I cut the cushion into strips, using a metal straightedge and a self-healing cutting mat, so that each piece of tape is on a separate 9 x 22 inch strip of cushion. I trim the edges (the very edge of the cushion isn’t the full thickness. We don’t want that under a stamp, because the stamp wouldn’t print evenly if it weren’t evenly cushioned. The first time we bought a sheet of cushion we were upset at losing that last three-quarters of an inch, but the people who sold it assured us that it wasn’t counted in the overall size.) Then comes the most strenuous part of the job: rolling the tape down with a rolling pin. I start at the middle of the strip and work toward the ends. This is double-sided tape, with release plastic in between layers of tape on the roll, so the release plastic is between the tape and the rolling pin at this point. Finally I wash the untaped side of the cushion with rubbing alcohol and let that dry. We end up with cushion with adhesive under release plastic on one side, ready to put stamp dies on.