I am Christina Crawford and I have been stamping for ten years. One thing that I would like to share with you that is so important to do is to clean your stamps when you are finished with the project. I just stamped a project, I used the letter press alphabet stamp from Stampin Up!

. I love that stamp set because I wanted to use a letter F, but even so there is two letters on each side of the block. So, its a really space saver. I have every alphabet letter in here, and its a nice small container. But I did use the F, I used a red inkpad and I went to stamp it. Now, if I took that stamp and I put it away, and the next time I wanted to use it I took it out and I used a different color, lets say yellow, Im not going to get that really nice yellow color. I would probably get an orange color, because even though this red ink would have been dried and maybe stored for a while, it would rewet that original ink thats on it, because it hasnt been cleaned. It will also probably damage my yellow inkpad. Its very important to clean your stamps before you put them away. What I am going to do to clean that is using the stamping scrub pad, when you open that up you will see that its black on both sides. I went ahead and gave myself a little guideline; this is the wet side, this is the dry side, I just wrote on it with a gel pen. Next is to use a Stampin Mist Cleaner. This has a nice conditioner inside that will help keep your rubber a little flexible longer, and its also very rubber friendly. Its not going to have a chemical in it that will hurt your rubber and dry it out. So, you could see this is just scrubbing off the ink a little bit. This is going to dry that ink off, and now I am ready to keep my stamp and store it back into the alphabet container. Some people say, well, I just use a damp paper towel and I have gone ahead and used baby wipes, but I found that this method of cleaning is more affordable over the time, and because it has a nice conditioner inside of the stamping, it helps preserve your stamps longer, and you will have these in years to come. I still have stamps from when I started ten years ago. If you take good care of them and you clean them, you will have yours for long time as well. Thank you.