The making of a Christmas stamp...

Hi Everyone,

I thought I'd share the process of making a Christmas stamp that Bev now has available to anyone willing to purchase it.

As an intro, I love words, books, and text (as is probably obvious given how wordy I am in my blog). So, I thought it would be nice to have a stamp based on phrases from Christmas carols. Sounds easy in principle, but not so easy to actually implement. This stamp probably took me 10 hours to design.

Step 1 - choose a list of Christmas Carol phrases that make me sing along just by hearing the phrase. Websites with Christmas Carols were valuable during this step just to make sure that I had covered the ones that I liked.

Step 2 - type them into a Word document with borders that the stamp was a 4 inches wide and six inches tall (this was the easy part).

Step 3 - decide what fonts to use for the Carols. I spent hours on this. Some were easy, such as the "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch" needed to be BOLD and larger font. Others were harder, such as "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire".

Step 4 - Rearrange carols in the stamp so that there was a mix of bold, capitals, cursive, italics, and other styles. Also try to mix the non-religious themed with the religious themed. More hours spent on this.

Step 5 - Send to Janice for her input - raise eyebrows when she writes back saying that the reindeer are a nice touch but isn't sure of the fish skeletons. After a bit of back and forth realize that her Word reads fonts different than mine does.

Step 6 - Send to Bev for processing. Bev likes it and generates a stamp for me - I don't believe we had any back and forth on it at all (in huge contrast to another stamp that I asked her for where I kept tweaking because I kept changing my mind) though now that I look at it closely I notice that it's not quite what my fonts were for her originally (I'm still really pleased with it though).

Step 7 - Ta dah! A Christmas stamp is born. I do have a new found appreciation for people that generate stamps - it's not so easy.

I'm currently working with Bev to design a new cursive stamp for me since I've misplaced my stamp. I'm basing it on my wedding ceremony that took place in Spanish in Costa Rica. I'm wrestling with whether I want the words to make sense or whether I should mix them up and incorporate typos to make the font more interesting (more y, q, f, t, and ls).

P.S. Bev now has a contact e-mail for people to reach her directly - it's bev@impressit.ca