My conclusion about the Teresa Collins Stampmaker

I spent one of my four days off designing and creating polymer stamps using my Teresa Collins Stampmaker and have come to the conclusion that it was probably not a good idea to buy it. Why? Well in addition to the polymer packets being rather expensive, the time spent creating the designs and the mess associated with cleaning the stamps after they have hardened in the stampmaker is just not something that I would recommend to anyone. Sorry Teresa, but what sounded pretty awesome on your videos just turned out to be messier and more difficult than I expected. If you have one of these and don't wear rubber gloves (like Teresa didn't wear them in her videos) I'd warn against it. I'm pretty gullible and since she says the polymer isn't harmful and since she didn't wear gloves I followed her lead. Now I have a rash on my left hand. There's no guarantee that it came from the chemicals, it actually might be from the day-long exposure on and off to Dawn for Dishes, but I did develop a rather icky headache by the end of the day.

I might decide to take some pictures of the stamps and resulting images later, but quite honestly I wouldn't pay money for these stamps if I saw them in the store. It's really odd that the tinsy winsy 8 point font stamp done with a plain font turned out great, but the 28 or larger point font with decorative swirls lost part of the swirls during the cleaning process. I even did those by hand rather than with the really horribly icky black wooden handled scrub brush provided in the kit. Why is it icky? Well that polymer apparently gets embedding in the wood and no amount of Dawn could get rid of the stickiness! Then the black paint stained my fingers. Did Teresa even use this product more than just for her videos? I'm sure she's a really nice lady and I've enjoyed some of her other products, but I've got to give this one a rather failing grade. Since the money has been spent on it I will no doubt buy more refill packets to make more stamps, but will only do a few at a time so I won't get exposed to the chemicals for so long, or maybe do it outside in the summer.

Ok, so my ranting and raving is over now. If anyone reading this has suggestions for making the process easier please, please pass them along to me!