A review of the brand new Stamparatus

Hopefully some of you will already have headed over to The Social PaperCrafter online magazine and read most of this article before but as the Stamparatus is going to be available to order in just 7 days time I wanted to re share in full my review of the Stamparatus created by Stampin Up.

Forget everything you know already about stamp positioning tools and read this honest review of the new Stamparatus written by someone who thought all stamping tools (other than my trusty stamp-a-ma-jig of course!) were a waste of money.

Many of you will have heard of the various stamp positioning tools already on the market, perhaps you even own a MISTI or the Tom Holtz stamping platform (or both). I’ll be honest, I’d heard of them, even looked at a couple on the web but I couldn’t work out what all the fuss was about. The only reason I was tempted was the fact that I could possibly achieve better results with my multi step stamps but didn’t think it was worth the expense just for that reason. I thought it was just another gimmicky tool to spend my money on that I could live without, I was perfectly happy using my stamp-a-ma-jig to line up my stamps. That was until I was lucky enough to go to OnStage, which is a Stampin’ Up! Demonstrator only event, where I watched a video of Sara Douglas introducing their brand new stamp positioning tool, the Stamparatus. My first thought while watching the video was oh, not another one, very quickly followed by I don’t want one, I NEED one. Was it just the excitement of the event, the hype of a brand new tool to play with or would this product change the way I craft?

 So what is the Stamparatus?

The Stamparatus has been a long time in the making and has been designed by crafters for crafters to allow precision stamping and to stamp multiples quickly and precisely. The base is a neat 20.3 cm x 20.3 cm x 2 cm, which means it won’t take up all of your workspace. It has two open sides allowing you to stamp pieces of card that are larger than the base and the two remaining sides hold reversible plates, giving you four sides to stamp with. On two sides of the base there are rulers for quick measuring and both the base and stamping plates have grid lines on to help align stamps perfectly every time. The entire base is magnetic, meaning you can put your card anywhere on the base to hold it in place with the magnets included. On the reverse of the Stamparatus are rubber feet to stop it from slipping around your work surface and this is also where you can store the two incredibly strong magnets. Also included with the tool is a foam mat which means that you can use the Stamparatus for both clear-mount rubber and photopolymer stamps.

My turn to play…

I had previously purchased a stamp set called Baby Bear in which the bear is made up of three layers built up in various colours, I had tried on several occasions to use this set but was never fully happy with the results. As the set is photopolymer you can see through to line it up but it was never perfect, you could always see where it wasn’t quite lined up as it should be and so the set went back on my shelf. Where the set is photopolymer I used the foam mat and lined my card stock up in the corner of the base plate. I used one magnet to hold the foam mat down and the second to hold the card stock in place, I then placed the first layer of the bear face down on the card and pushed the plate down gently to pick up the stamp. It picked up most of the bear well but the part of the bear in the corner hadn’t been picked up fully, I laid the plate back down and tried again, putting more pressure on that corner but it still wasn’t picking it up fully. Even I could tell that when I inked up my stamp it wasn’t going to stamp properly. So I moved my card into the centre of the base to try again. This time the plate picked the entire stamp up perfectly, I then inked my stamp and closed the plate over the card again. When I lifted the plate I was pleasantly surprised that my image had stamped really clearly onto the card and I had not transferred across any of the ink that I’d managed to get on the plate when inking the stamp. A big bonus for the messy crafter.

I then took the second image for the bear and placed this directly onto my card to line it up with the image already stamped down, I used the second plate to pick this image up, ink it and stamp back down. The second layer of the bear had been stamped perfectly on top of the first. I hadn’t had to put a lot of pressure onto the plates to get my image to stamp perfectly which means that this will be a great tool for my customers who sometime struggle holding the blocks or to get a crisp image because they can’t apply pressure. Excited at this point, I flipped one of the plates round so that I could pick up and stamp the third image and when I lifted it up I realised that for the first time since buying the stamp set there was no shadow around the edge of the bear like I usually get when I free hand stamp. I’m not embarrassed to say that I clapped in excitement like a child on their birthday. Not only was it a perfect image for the first time ever but I could go back and do it again and again without having to change blocks for each layer, I could do all three in quick succession by a simple flip round of the plate!

The above image was created free hand with stamping blocks and the below image was created using my Stamparatus, isn't he perfect?

The other aspect of the Stamparatus that I wanted to try out was something that is being called the hinge step technique, as I haven’t seen this done with any of the other stamp positioning tools on the market. As the two stamping plates are reversible they are not fixed in place which means not only can you take them out to flip them round you can move them up or down a hinge. This means that you can create a repeating pattern without having to keep moving your card stock or repositioning the stamp on the plate.

To create my card I used a banner image which I placed on the card where I wanted the top sweep to be, I then inked the image and stamped down. Then I lifted the plate out of the hinges and positioned it one hinge down from its original position, reinked and stamped again. At this point I learnt that if I didn’t get the impression on the paper I wanted, either because I hadn’t inked up the stamp enough or I hadn’t put enough pressure on the back of the plate, I could just re ink and stamp again without it leaving any trace of the fact that I had to stamp it twice. I continued doing this until I had reached the bottom of my card. At which point I repositioned the stamp on my card to sweep across in the opposite direction and repeated the hinge steps until my banners swept all the way down my card. It’s best to clean the stamp before repositioning it so that you don’t end with finger prints on your card. I only had to change the position of the stamp once and hadn’t needed to move my card stock at all.

Conclusion

Will I be giving away my stamp-a-ma-jig? No, not yet, but will I continue using the Stamparatus? Yes definitely, it allows me to create perfect multi step images with ease and saves time when I want to create multiple consistently crisp, clean images. As with any stamping product there are pros and cons, with this one in particular you have to be really careful not to let the incredibly strong magnets snap together as they will easily break and if you want to stamp right to the edges of your card stock you can’t have it lined up in the corners of the tool. However in my opinion the pros far out weigh the cons, I think this tool is well worth the money and should be part of every stampers tool kit. I really wish I had had this tool when I was completing my Christmas card orders last year, I could have saved a lot of time and money.