Stamped fabric labels

sew-ichigo.blogspot.com Kitchen Classics Series

I'd only heard of paper piecing a month ago, and saw some great projects that used letter stamps.  Then I saw a post over at Sew Quine about making labels with stamps, and soon it seemed like I was running into interesting uses for stamping fabric all over the place, including some awesome quilt labels at one of the blogs I read (sadly for the life of me I can't find the link, as I think she'd gotten the same stamps I did, and her quilt labels were adorable).

ayumills.blogspot.com Juice Blocks

So I stopped by Joann's and lo and behold, they were having a 40% off sale on stamps and stamp pads.  I hadn't read upon what type of stamp pad to get and panicked.  After about 10 minutes of reading every single stamp pad and seeing nothing about fabric except one that said "not recommended for fabric", I just gave up and grabbed an inexpensive one from Hampton Art.  With the sale and my 10% off card I ended up with the alphabet stamps, a stamp pad, and some Sewing related stamps from TPC Studios for around $13. 

Did a bit of looking around and found this awesome link at Crafttestdummies.com where somebody was gracious enough to compare the clarity and washability of 12 different stamp pads on fabric

assembly and initial test stamping onto Ikea sheeting

I was excited about the letter stamps until I opened them to find out that they came in three pieces - sticky letter label for the top, wood stamp piece & sticky backed stamps of the letters themselves.  Aligning the stamp's orientation to the letters on top was amazingly difficult for ME at least, but eventually I got everything "straight enough".
I was nervous about the mysterious process of heat setting the labels so they wouldn't bleed in the wash, but it turned out to be pretty simple.  I chose these ones.

1. stamp fabric
2. let ink dry
3. iron both sides of fabric for about two minutes
4. wait a week before laundering 
 

I think it'll be a blast to start plastering my name all over everything I make, otherwise I might forget who made all this weird looking crap all over my house

I may buy cloth tape at some point to us at a later date, but for now I'm just experimenting on fabric.  Ikea sheet scraps had horrible ironing issues, Kona cotton seems to work fine.  It's taking some trial and error to not overlap letters, but it's fun to play around with them.  Bad thing is I'm getting this overwhelming urge to go buy some kitty stamps too.