Upcycle Bottle Caps & Styrofoam into Stamps | TUTORIAL

Unfortunately most restaurants still heavily rely on Styrofoam boxes as a means for the customer to take home their unfinished food. Every now and then I do end up with food leftover. I'm also left with a Styrofoam box that I dread being given because I don't want to be responsible for its disposal. I just have to agree with Jane Orr of I am a Green Being blog, "Styrofoam is EVIL!" but the least anyone can do is find some continuous uses for it besides the obvious, use it as packaging material. I made stamps. I been wanting to make stamps for a while now and with a recent dinner outing I was left with a styrofoam box...

Now this tutorial will be a 2 in 1 upcycling endeavor! You will upcycle not only styrofoam but plastic bottle caps too! Remember plastic is forever, there is no such thing as disposable plastic.

You Will Need:

• Stryofoam, like a take-out box
  
• Plastic Bottle and Container Caps
  
• Scissors or Touch Knife
  
• Pencil
  
• Some sort of permanent adhesive, I used E-6000 but as you'll read later that didn't go exactly as planned.
  
  
  
  
  

Not pictured above but you'll also need:

• Stamping Ink
  
• Paper or Cardstock or whatever you want to test and use your stamps on
  
• Stencil
  

Let's Begin... 1. Cut out your styrofoam into smaller more manageable pieces.

2. Draw out what you want as your stamp shape. The stencil is optional, I just happened to find this old thing and I figured I'd use it at least for one stamp.

3. Glue your cut out shapes onto the caps. I used the E-6000 and what happened was that it was too strong for the styrofoam and it ate through the first cut outs I put on. I had to add another layer of cut outs to the first and I used very little E-6000 that second time but it still kind of ate through so I added a third layer with even less glue and that finally did it. I definitely think some other sort of glue like maybe crazy glue would work best for this, especially with thin styrofoam.

4. Now you have your stamps!

Silly me, I honestly thought you could use acrylic paint with these stamps. It did not go well either. Don't use acrylic paint with styrofoam stamps. It just doesn't work or look right in the end.

I ended up buying and using these dye ink pads by Hampton Art in Aqua blue and Black.

You can create all kinds of interesting designs with repetitive patterns, there's no limit.

What will you be stamping?