Don’t worry, we already gave John his Father’s Day present, so no spoiler alert needed 🙂
We are so thankful for everything John does for us. He’s such a wonderful dad and husband and I’m always trying to come up with something good for the boys to get him, but he isn’t easy to surprise! He has been subtly mentioning (for a few years) that he would like metal collar stays. The plastic ones seem to vanish into thin air! I finally took his hints and ordered this pack from Amazon, though, I would order a softer metal if I do this again in the future! Stainless steal was very hard to stamp for a beginner!
We bought a few stamping sets for my mom for Christmas last year (this and this) so I thought I would give them a test drive for John’s gift!
My dad was helping to set me up with my stamping station, and could somehow foresee that I would smack my fingers while trying to hold the metal stamps while hammering. He gave me the pliers to hold the metal stamps and good thing too! I missed the stamps a few times while probably swinging the hammer too hard. After I stamped them, they were really hard to read. I looked up ways online to get that black letter look and found a few tutorials that said you could use a Sharpie!
So I filled in the lines of the letter with Sharpie, let it dry, then rubbed away the excess with a paper towel.
I love how they turned out!
I found the smaller stamps to be easier to use; I couldn’t quite get the larger letters to indent. I suppose because there was less surface area or something like that. But actually, it looks like the kids did those ones, so I think they are cute. Also, while stamping, the collar stays kind of started to curl up. To fix this, I turned the collar stay over and pounded it back flat. All-in-all it was a fun and pretty easy DIY Father’s Day gift! I love handmade everything (duh), so this was perfect! I think John likes them too, even though they don’t fit in most of his dress shirts (I’ll be ordering more in a smaller size; measure your husbands current collar stays!!). Whoops!
