How do you erase ink mistakes? smears, etc?
 

If I'm making a card and I get one of those awful corner marks (do you know what I mean?) is there any kind of pen or product that will remove the excess ink? Like a corrector pen maybe?

I am trying to get better with trimming the stamps and I try not to 'rock' it as I stamp but it's still frustrating to be almost done with a card and make a mistake like that.

Usually I try to add some embellishment to hide it but that's not always possible and I've often put so much time and money in to the card that I hate to throw it away and start over.

What do you guys know that I don't????? :confused: :confused: :confused:

Great ??? I'd like to know that secret...
Someone has to know a trick. If it's known
it's here, that's for sure.

You are right about the trimming and rocking. I have also learned to not use a pad of scratch paper under my project - just a single sheet.

I have had good luck with my hobby blade to remove excess rubber on my stamps that were trimmed before I really knew how to trim.
Hope this helps.
Lynn

well...
 

When all else fails: DIRECT TO PAPER. If I get a fingerprint, smear or ink somewhere I don't want it, I try DTP.

So many of the stamps that I cut & mounted in my early days have too much rubber around the image. I will take my super sharp, wonderful SU scissors & cut off the excess rubber. I do this while the rubber is attached to the block because I'm too lazy to try to peel it off.

Does this make sense?

TexasJodyLynn has a wonderful idea on what to do if you get an extra smudge on your card.

Melissa

Aside from scraping the surface of the CS with an X-acto blade, I know of no way to remove stray ink marks. My demo has taught me that the speckle stamp from Itty Bitty Backgrounds covers a multitude of sins! :p

Trimming your stamps as close as possible to the image is the best advice I have, unless it's a really long and thin or tiny image. Then, you need to make sure the rubber isn't any narrower than 1/2" or so, or the stamp will almost always rock no matter how careful you are, and you will catch the rubber edge in your ink or get stains on the wood blocks. Some people brush or spray a sealer onto their wood, but I just don't have the patience for that.

2 days ago I was making cards (for my weekly mail out to friends) and wouldn't you know I had black ink on my pinkie and it got onto my card! arg!
I didn't want to start all over, as I was just applying the bow. So, i got out my bleach pen and carefully bleached over the black. No it did not disappear completely, but you can barely notice it. Over time I have come to live with the fact that no flower, butterfly or leaf is perfect, and try to be such a perfectionist anymore. :)

Stampin' Up! always says there is never a mistake, just room for an embellishment! Yesterday I was at a stamp camp with a friend. We were creating something using a horizontal stamp, but having to create a vertical greeting. Both of us ended up masking incorrectly and got words where we didn't want them. We took different colored cardstock and created circles and half circles to "fix" the correction. We didn't know what we were going to do at first, but in the end, we both liked the look.

I have a few other cards I made with "goofs" -- have to look into the ways I'm going to embellish them!

The three "C" s -- Cut (out), Cover (with an embellishment or another piece of c/s) or Camoflage (stamp a little something over it - squiggly, dots, etc.) Don't think you can erase it but there might be something else you can do to save it.

HTH

Ruthy

Hi- If you are using non-permanent ink that has to be embossed in order to become permanent, I have used a white rubber eraser. It works great and leaves no residue or smudging.

Some of my stamps always give me that little added corner, especially my alphabet stamps. i have learned to turn the stamp over before I stamp and to check the corners. I take a q-tip and remove any ink along the edges. It also helps to hold the stamp in your hand and ink it upside down with just the edge of the pad if it is one of those hard to stamp with stamps. Hope this helps. But if you do get some ink on the paper make a miracle out of a mistake! I agree with adding embellishments, or sometimes I just cut out a square of coordinating paper and glue it over the error.

In my earlier days I did not trim all my stamps as close as I should have. After reading a thread here on scs - I stick the stamp that caused my grief into the micro wave for 10 seconds, peel the rubber off - retrim it and stick it right back on - doesn't give me any more problems. I also check my corners before I stamp just to make sure! Thanks to all you wonderful people that post - my work is getting much better!:D

WOW you ladies are amazing!
 

You all shared the most wonderful ideas! I don't have a SU :( Demonstrator because I haven't found anyone that sticks with it, so I have never attended a stamp camp or class etc. I'm pretty much self-taught and maybe not such a great teacher! :rolleyes:

So THANK YOU for sharing all the ideas to fix my errors!

I too have learned to trim my rubber very close but sometimes on the tiny stamps I still get an edge. Like mentioned above, I have used bleach and often get all the color out but sometimes it leaves a slight bulge in the cardstock when it dries. The trick is to use a tiny bit of bleach and go back and repeat after it dries.

Sandy

One more thing I haven't seen in other posts is to keep all layers separate...glue together as the very last step. That way if the stamping isn't perfect you are just redo-ing one layer and not the whole card.

HTH!

--debbie

I have heard the term 'direct to paper' or 'dtp' before. What does this mean exactly?

Gloria

Gloria, direct-to-paper, or dtp, is taking your ink pad to your card stock and intentionally smearing the ink on it. Another version is MOP or messy on purpose. It's great for the shabby chic look or something rustic or masculine.


Kathleen

I will heartily "second" all the suggestions already made, but sometimes you just HAVE to start over! Usually there is some part of the card that you can salvage to use again.

This just happened to me - I worked for an hour on a paint chip card with a silk flower in the middle. I was SO proud of this card and I really thought it was some of my best work....until! The card definitely needed a sentiment or something on the front. I decided to use "joy" from small script, then use 3 one-inch squares of the paint chips to spell out the word JOY. I inked up my stamp with black stazon ink and proceeded to smear the "joy" all over the paint chip blocks. :( The more I tried to fix, the worse the mess became! I finally ended up tearing my 4 paint chips off the front. I'll have to go to Walmart to get more of those colors, and then redo that part of the card.

Someone on SCS also made the suggestion that on some of the narrower stamps (like Small Script, etc.) that you take the foam mounting off the rubber stamp and just attach the red part to your stamp. I think that would give a less (rockable) stamp, though I've yet to try it.

Hope this was of some help to someone!

I find that the solution is just to use a lighter hand esp when inking!
I actually have to say, out loud, "kiss" or even "baby kiss" to get my heavy hands to lighten up!
banging the stamp on the ink is so easy to do at three in the morning!
and if you can keep the ink off the edges it does't matter so much if you rock when stmping the cs...still though..."kiss" is so nice and soft for stamping it too!
I also do the q-tip clean but I also find that using the stampin spots for alphabets is less hassle in the end because they are closer in size to the small blocks.
also for long stem type things use a marker and, again that should help.
good luck!