Organizing My Ink Pads
21 Jun 2011 1 Comment
in Other Tags: craft room, organizing ink pads, stamp pads
When I started accumulating lots of ink pads for stamping, I thought it would be a good idea to have a visual display of every color. I’ve had this ugly-but-useful display in front of me at my craft desk for years and it has been so helpful as I hold colored paper up to the stamped ink pad to determine which colored inks would work best in my card.
My Old Ink Pad Chart
Now I live in a new place, have a new craft room and wanted to get more organized, so I grabbed a really pretty Hawaiian flower (Hibiscus? Plumeria?) stamp from local Kent, WA company Denami Design and made it work really hard! This took me HOURS over a few days. Maybe if I were more organized, this would have gone faster? It took a lot of time to clean off the stamp after each impression.
Step one: stamping and stamping!
I have two jumbo multi-colored raised felt ink pads that I finally made samples of. I also FINALLY colored each of my stamp markers onto the stamp so I could see which colors I had. If you’re not an avid stamper, you may not know that brush markers are useful in coloring acrylic and rubber stamps – yes, you color ONTO the stamp and stamp it onto your paper. This is how you can get a stamped image with several different colors.
If I can see the colors of the markers and ink pads I have, I am more likely to use them. I don’t keep all my stamps out on my work space because they are all different shapes and sizes and they don’t stack well.
Step two: more stamping and labeling!
Once this was done, I trimmed out each stamped image, grabbed my repositional adhesive and organized them by color. I got them onto three clean pages – ahhhh, this is a breath of fresh air! I didn’t realize how stressful looking at that old chart was. This is much cleaner:
Ink Chart Project: Complete!
Click any image to see a larger version.
So, if you haven’t taken the time to do this for your ink pad and brush marker collection, I suggest you pick a rainy Saturday afternoon and make a chart like this! Thanks for reading my blog. 
Dec 13, 2011 @ 11:36:35
Great job on organizing your inks. Seeing the colors makes all the difference. One thing I did is used small rolodex cards for each color/brand and so it sits on my desk and I can spin the colors to find what works.