To wood or not to wood.....

THAT is the question.......to suffer the weight and space of precious shelves....
Did you ever think I would do a stamping title to Shakesphear's "to be or not to be" ????  yeah, me either!  lol!!

But what I come today with is a tutorial for you.....so sit back and be ready to wood or not to wood.....

I have tons....not really tons....but I have a crazy amount of stamps that are meant to be wood mounted that aren't mounted yet....so what is a a girl to do????  I must tell you....I LOVE the new unmounted option that Stampin' Up! is offering us now....but the sets in the regular idea book and catalog are still wood mount.  BUT - they don't come already mounted, so really - you do have an unmounted option.  following me??

hehe!!  I recently earned the "Just____" sets from sale a bration for free - just basketball, just tennis, just soccer....you get the picture.....  Well, they are all three stamp sets - three blocks, each in their own clam shell box....weighing down my shelves, taking up valuable space that I could be using for more new stamps....lol!!  So I decided to go unmounted, baby!
Ok, so I started with the Just Basketball set.

I will start with the ball/hoop stamp.  It is meant to be one stamp.  It has one block, one sticker.  Well, going unmoutned allows you to customize your stamps without worrying about not having any extra blocks. So i cut my stamp apart to have the ball and hoop separate images.  (this is how I would want to use them anyway, probably)

Next, I took the ball and layed it upside down over the sticker sheet, lining it up as best as I could.

Then, I took my craft and rubber scissors and trimmed around it, holding the rubber stamp in place.  You could trace on the sticker, but I thought this wouls be just as easy and would skip a step.

Next, peel the backing off the rubber stamp and lay it rubber side down on yoru work surface.  Then, peel the backing off of the sticker and put it on the back of the rubber stamp.  Now you have what looks exactly like a clear mount rubber stamp.....except - this is a sticker, NOT cling vinyl.  There is  big difference.  The sticker will NOT cling to the clear mount blocks like the cling vinyl that comes with the new clear mount rubber stamps.  So, what's a girl to do????

I pulled out my Tombo Mono Multi glue.  I rubbed a thin layer all over the sticker label and set aside to dry.  The Tombo Mono Multi is repositionable when it is allowed to dry - genius!!

After the glue layer is dry, you still need to tap it on yout hands to take some of the "stick" off - the tombo glue is very strong....so this just lessens the grip a bit.

Place the stamps in an empty stamp case available through Stampin' Up! and enjoy all of your extra space!!!

There are 6 stamp sets in this one case.  They are all the same theme, so finding them on my shelves will be easy as well as labeling them.  Can you believe that all of thee boxes now only take up the amount of space that a dvd case takes up?????  LOVE it!

This really isn't any harder than mounting onto wood, just a couple of extra steps, but they are well worth it, in my opinion.

well, that's all folks!