mark my words

My latest addition to the craft distraction armamentarium:  a set of metal letter stamps.  

I wanted to make plant markers that would last year after year.  Last year I tried getting some silverware at a thrift store and writing on the handles with a sharpie.  However, sharpies wash off in the rain.

Then I learned that hammering stamps onto stainless steel doesn't work at all.  

My next door neighbor has been selling a lot of small antique-y things that she inherited, mostly jewelry and small things.  One thing she hasn't been able to sell well is silverware.  There's a lot of cute stuff, but it's all silver, which nobody uses anymore because who wants to spend the time polishing.

But silver is eminently stampable.

Hammering the spoons flat is a little tricky.  This spoon was a jelly spoon or something like that and was already mostly flat.  The small knives work really well because they don't even need hammering.

To make the letters dark, you color over the letter with a sharpie and then sand it off while it's still wet.  The color remains in the valleys of the stamped letter.  The "basil" is a little smudgier because that spoon is a little softer, and so the letters stamped more deeply, and thus was a little trickier to sand away.

So fun!  And now I can make markers for any and all of the plants and herbs I am planting this year.