I have always thought of My First Color Box ink pads as the best kids' ink out there. I use them on stamps I am testing because of the ease with which they are cleaned. I let my girls play with these ink pads with out supervision and don't worry about what I will find when it is time to clean up. 

Tonight I received a message from a lovely customer stating that she had read reviews about these ink pads on one particular shopping super site complaining about how horribly unwashable they were. 

I don't want to rave about a product if there is any doubt in my faith of the statements I am making. Her question made me doubt myself so I set out to do an experiment. 

-Image one shows my arm pre-inking.
-Image two shows my hand inked up with pink, red, orange, yellow, lime, turquoise, violet, brown and black inks. I stamped the purple twice and put the black in a conspicuous location because these two are the colors I feared might not wash off quite so easily.
-Image three is the after shot. I left the ink on my arm through dinner (which thrilled my daughters and gave us all sorts of interesting things to discuss). So after having the ink on my arm for about half and hour I washed it one time with Method dish washing soap.

You can see that the black didn't come off completely, the purple left a slight haze and I am able to identify where the red ink was. I have since then (2 hours have passed) washed my hand two times. The purple is just about gone, I cannot see the red but the black is still visibly the image of a soccer ball.

Interestingly enough, the child safe washable My First Color Box ink was the least easily removed ink. Not cool.

This arm received the same treatment as the other. The inks (in order of appearance) are My First Color Box, Color Box Pigment, Color Box Acid Free Archival and my favorite permanent ink, Staz On. After about 30 minutes I washed this arm with Method dish washing liquid. The only one to come off completely was the Color Box Pigment ink. The one that came off the least was the washable kiddo ink.

So, what do I have to say about my findings?  

I love My First Color Box ink pads. They come in a plethora of awesome colors. They aren't too juicy so they can't be squished all over. They have a raised edge around the ink pad it self so that if turned upside down the ink pad won't make an impression at all (on a flat surface like the table...it would surely mark on carpet). I have been using some of mine for almost 4 years and they still work fantastically. They fit together in a stack to keep them nice and neat and best of all they are made in the U.S.A.

I started the experiment suspecting that there might be a problem with black, purple and red. Why? Because these are the same colors that take a bit of work to remove when it comes to Crayola markers, paint and bathtub crayons. Our Melissa and Doug bath crayons also lingered a while on the walls when purple, red and black were used. I admit those colors "disappeared" from my kids' collection after only a use or two.

I stand firm in my recommendation of Clear Snap's My First Color Box ink. Just don't give your child black ...and maybe avoid the purple (but it wasn't bad) if you have family portraits the next day.

February seems to be our month for toddler birthdays. We have yet another party next week (I'm already working on his gift, it's cute! I can't wait to finish and get some pictures up.) Last weekend we went to a Cars themed 3rd birthday for a little boy. My little one chose a space theme for his stamp set. I wanted to make him a letter set but he has 11 different letters in his name. That is A LOT. We opted for a space shuttle with his name on it and a few little stamps to go along with the theme.

I think these kiddie sets are going to be big for my shop. I can't say I'm disappointed. I love playing with glitter. There wasn't all this super fine glitter in so many beautiful colors when I was little. I remember having a tube of 1mm square-cut irridescent white glittler that I put on Christmas cards for snow. I also had a little pink acrylic box of teddy bear glitter (which I still have by the way...half full even!) and some crazy random cut green, red and silver. The only other glitter I ever got to use was this vintage plastic canister of gold square cut .5-ish mm glitter.  When I was in the Army I bought two containers of super fine glitter, one red and one pink that I used to make valentines and some wrapping paper for my [now] husband. I just used up the little jar of pink making Valentine Letter Sets. I always loved to look a the glitter so much that I made sure to keep a little in the jars...I'd never use a package completely.  I am thoroughly enjoying this messy process and am so glad to see so many people enjoying them.

Also, I must admit now that some of the glitter on the couch is from me rather than all having come from my girls' dress-up clothes, it doesn't bother me quite so much.

We are all finally to the point of being almost healthy. We have another birthday party this weekend. I will post images of the little guy's gift when I finish it and I have my light box out and hope to get some good images of a few new items.

New information to share: inks for stamping on muslin (on muslin bags for shower favors, wedding bird seed for tossing etc.).

TPC Studio Clearly Better (formulated for use with clear stamps)
-dye and pigment blend stamp pad
-I used black on unbleached muslin and got a nice impression. The image is clear and is the darkest of the clean printing black ink impressions but is not a dark black impression.

Color Box
-pigment stamp pad
-I used both black and cranberry Color Box ink pads on unbleached muslin. The black made a clean image which dried quickly but was quite light. The images was quite a bit lighter than the TPC Studio ink pad.
-The Cranberry ink (and I am assuming any color Color Box Pigment would have similar results) made a nice dark clean impression. The impression didn't dry as quickly as the black pigment did. This may mean that my black pad is older than the cranberry, but they are not production dated as the washable child safe pads are. I was able to smudge the impression a little with firm pressure, but pigment tends to dry completely over a longer period of time (a day or two max.) or with the application of heat. This color pigment impression really looks nice.

Encore Ultimate Metallic (Tsukineko)
-water soluble pigment ink pad
- The impression is nice and clean and dried quickly. The silver (metallic aspect) is less apparent than on paper making the impression appear gray. I think that gold ink would make a really nice impression on muslin with an antique bronzy look.

JMP Indexing Ink on a linen pad
-indexing ink intended to make permanent impressions on wood or plastic
-This ink made a clearly black impression, dries very quickly and will not be affected by exposure to moisture. However, the ink bled into the fabric.

Memento (Tsukineko)
-fade resistant dye ink pad
-I unfortunately only have a very pale pink Memento ink pad so it is a bit difficult to see the impression. It appears to be quite clean and dried quickly. Once dry this ink will not bleed and is water resistant. It dries more quickly and won't smudge as the pigment ink does.

So, with the exception of the indexing ink, any of the ink types works well to stamp on muslin. TPC Studio Clearly Better and Color Box seem to make the best impressions, with the TPC Studio Clearly Better drying more quickly and is listed as waterproof and permanent on fabric if set with heat.

This weekend my little one was invited to her first birthday party of the year. I absolutely love getting to make gifts for the girls' friends. I love making things but am very practical and firmly believe one only needs so much stuff. So, once Liesie has a set of glitter stamps...that's it. I won't make her another, even if it is different because it just seems pointless to me. This leads me to occasionally forget to keep thinking of new ideas. Well, this week I found that kiddos' parties are a great cure! 

We were quite sick this week, so I should have known I was making a mistake in trying to do something new and creative for the birthday girl's present. I received a second party invitation at school this week and I know of a good friend's child with a birthday this month (I expect we will be invited to his party) so I need to come up with a small slew of gifts in the comming weeks. Now, I clearly state that I need several days to process the glitter mounted stamps on the Valentine Set listing in my Etsy shop; nonetheless, i decided on Wednesday evening that I would make a letter set for Liesie's classmate the following day. I let her choose the glitter colors and such. Once I've done this there is no going back because she doesn't just forget about things like some kids do.

We have company coming this weekend too so our super-messy-four-people-were-sick-nothing-has-been-done-in-days house needed to be cleaned for Friday too. I was so tired after spending 5 hours at doctors' appointments that I did nothing on Thursday eveing!

At somepoint I thought a cute idea would be to make a letter set with a theme for regular occasions. Does this make sense? My pink and red set was Valentine's Day, I made a rainbow for a "regular" set but it seemed to be lacking something. The little girl with the party today had a short name so I needed to think of extra stamps rather than just working the letters out. I wound up going for a lady bug theme.  I took some pictures (which didn't turn out fabulously because I was in a rush) which I'll post here. They turned out well. I was happy with them and I will be doing more this week for the next party....but I will not wait until Friday to start! I was up until 5am working on those stamps this morning. At some point I realized it might not be a good idea to make such detailed mounts because I couldn't expect someone to want to pay what I would need to charge to make them "worth it." They didn't turn out exactly as I had planned but were cute nonetheless. At about 3am I trashed one round mount and started a new one. This one I wound up omitting because I just couldn't get it to look quite right. I was left with 4 letter stamps, two lady bug themed stamps with cute mounts an ink pad and a little notebook. I won't even work out a price for something like this because like I said, it was a super crazy amount of work to decorate these mounts with different colors of glitter. However, I may add some cute sets like this to Etsy soon. I will need to down grade the mounts a little and will probably be able to keep it at about $30 like the currently listed letter set.

I'd love any other ideas you might have. I'm makeing an space shuttle themed set for the little boy's birthday next week and also thought of jungle animals, sports balls....If you'd like to see my take on something please leave a note and I'll post some of what I come up with here.