Foam rubber handicraft

Foam rubber (proper name: cellular rubber), is a really fine-pore elastic foam material available in many strengths and shapes. Foam rubber can be bought in sheet form or can be purchased as pre-punched parts.

If you use foam rubber in sheet form, use a cutter, scissors or nail scissors to cut into the desired shape with ease (for curves, say). Children can also achieve their own creative ideas very simply using foam rubber.

So that you don't have to press the individual parts together for long, use a quick-drying glue, but not a superglue, because this will not be suitable for this purpose. In art-and-craft shops, you can get special foam rubber adhesives.

Permanent markers are excellent tools for inscribing and drawing on foam rubber. When it comes to drawing outlines, fine lines or dots, a water-resistant fineliner is ideal.

There are many creative handicraft ideas using foam rubber: door signs, hair bands, brooches, mobiles, flower pictures, decorated wrapping paper, coloured birthday cards and so on.

Foam rubber is also ideal for making stamps.

Read on to find out how to turn "boring" foam rubber into stamps, large and small, in a matter of moments: paper, envelopes or tougher card. At the flick of a wrist, conjure up fabulous images, great wrapping paper or colourful birthday cards

What you need to make your own stamps:
- a sheet of foam rubber
- old lids (e.g. from jam jar / drink bottles) or wooden blocks
- nail scissors
- ball-point pen
- glue
- edding 1340 brushpen
- paper for printing

Using the ball-point pen, draw various different shapes onto the foam rubber, for example stars or hearts, letters and flowers, animals and numbers - whatever you want!  Don't make your shapes too complicated because otherwise it will be difficult to cut them out later on.

Cut out your various shapes and then stick to the lids (making sure that you have turned your design the other way round where appropriate before gluing it down). As soon as the glue is dry, the stamps are ready!

Now dye the stamp with the edding 1340 brushpen or press onto an ink pad - and then you can get down to business: you can make colourful wrapping paper from ordinary white paper sheets or turn a piece of white card into a flowery birthday card  - or even transform a large sheet of paper into a really special poster.

Tip: once you have dyed the stamp with edding 4500 textile markers, you can also stamp t-shirts or bed linen and other textiles too.