Homemade "Tim Holtz" Distress Ink Applicators

We are off on another quick weekend trip to Chicago tomorrow so I'm setting this up to post while I'm gone (hopefully it'll work!) Our "baby" Sara turns 21 on Monday! Very hard to believe - now all five kiddos are adults. Wow, that sounds surreal. So we will spend the weekend with her and another daughter who also lives in Chicago and return on Monday (figured the big girl didn't want to spend the birthday night celebrating with parents...so we will celebrate earlier).

I've finished my project with the Disney princess stamps. I'm wondering what my readers might have thought I would be doing with them. I have made them into my personal version of the Tim Holtz Distress Ink Applicators which are a bit expensive to have one for every color like he does!

This isn't my genius idea - I saw it here on Becca's blog. You can go to her site to see her wonderful tutorial and pictures on how to do it. This is a photo of mine finished. You can see one that's slightly yellow (I tested it) and that's the first one I did. I was freehand cutting and it turned out looking like a kindergartener made it (the photo is after much trimming!). After e-mailing her I found out she had used her Sizzix circle die with the Accucut machine. So I used a friend's Accucut to cut the rest. They turned out a bit smaller than the block because we didn't have the right size circle and ended up using a flower center. Hey, it works!

I love that I will have one for every color family at least and the wood block will help me keep my hands ink-free. These blocks are nicely finished and feel really nice in the hand.

If anyone plans to make their own, I will give you one big tip: get square blocks so you can have nice, smooth cut-n-foam tops!