Postal Embellishments
A first foray into the world of custom, laser-cut stamps to embellish letters for penpals. There goes my excuse that I don't have any stationery!This one is perhaps a bit of a detour from the usual fare, but I hope some folks a get a kick out of it. Lately I've been getting back into corresponding with my my penpals and I realized that the laser cutter is capable of cutting rubber!
The laser is an impressive machine that is capable of controlling position and intensity of the laser quite precisely; this means that it's possible to engrave quite a variety of materials and it's even capable of generating the ramped surface you see on most stamps.
Perhaps it's worth it to back up a bit however — why would stamps be of use here and how complicated is the process really? Early on in my days of corresponding with penpals via typewriter I made one of the most valuable purchases: a self-inking return-address stamp. Being able to use it for a quick letterhead and on my covers made sending out quick messages far easier, and it's now been used on many, many hundreds of letters. One thing I noticed however was that when I began expanding the collection to include a particular flavor or theme to a letter was that the large blocks of pre-mounted stamps became a bit unwieldy and often weren't quite the right tonal match for my letters. Of note, I'd stumbled on a few fun "postmark" stamps, however they had a real "craft—store" vibe to them and I found myself less inclined to use them.
Really, I wanted to be able to replicate the authentic cancellation stamps of old, allowing letters to feel more like a dip back into history. True, I could send the designs off to be made into custom stamps, however these usually weren't that cheap, hard to justify for an embellishment on a casual letter, never mind if I edited the design poorly!
Not quite the same though if a sheet of rubber could be tossed onto the laser tray and cut out in a few minutes. The laser we have is a CO2 style, 100w model in a shared space with only basic ventilation. This means that some materials are simply a no-go for cutting, and wood/acrylic are the usual cutting materials. Stumbling on some laser safe rubber specifically for engraving though, it seemed like a promising start.
Taking inspiration from a postcard dispatched from the barracks at Kiel, I made the first example by photographing, adjusting, cropping, and tracing the image before converting it to a solid engraving. When modeling it after another black-and-white source, the image trace worked plenty well when the original image was detailed enough. Some parts did require some cleanup and yet others needed a bit of "artistic interpretation" to ensure a reliable print - the originals aren't always that clean, after all.
Below you can see that the E in Kiel and the 1 on the bottom of the cancellation mark were a bit faint, so I added a little bit of stamp back to shore them up.
Engraving and cutting were fairly straightforward, while the settings are likely to vary quite a bit by machine, 1 found that a lower power and medium speed worked well, especially when coupled with multiple passes. The engraving process did however leave a good bit of rubber dust however. Dusting some of it off worked well enough, however here I made a terrible error; I attempted to wash the remainder off with water...
The dust blobbed up and nestled into the crevices, stubbornly refusing to wash off with hot water, soap, or even aggressive brushing. The impressions were okay, but the stamps looked awful and the dust caused some loss of fine detail. Reading up, I stumbled on an endorsement of the forbidden spray. I was about to open the WD-40... at the typewriter bench...
Lo and behold, it worked wonders. The forbidden spray quickly glomming onto the dust and leaving it almost as clean as new after a few scrubs. I still won't be throwing any into any of the typewriters, but still was glad to have a can of the stuff laying around. The WD-40 did seem to do odd things with the ink pads however, so I made sure to use a final soap-water pass and dah the faces on a paper towel before using them. I had seen suggestions to use a compressor to dust them off first, however my experience was that this didn't help much and the dust was already stuck on there.
Mounting was a simple strip of double sided tape or super glue on a wooden block cut on the laser at the same time, but using a much thinner stock than the giant blocks normally found on stamps. Overall, the results on this first attempt were rather exciting! These rubber sheets are fairly affordable, right around $5 a sheet or so, dropping the cost of each of these to 25-50¢ each, depending on how many I botched or forgot to invert (whoops). Definitely going to be doing more of these in the future, but the prototypes seem to be working very well.
Before closing, here's an up-close shot of the draft angles, you can see the little bit of ramp up to the high parts of the stamp that support the printing surface:
