Strawberry Plant Rubber Stamp & Strawberry Border Stamp for Card Making

Who can resist a basket of freshly picked strawberries? This little summer collection — a strawberry plant rubber stamp with its own matching strawberry border stamp — is the kind of sweet, timeless design I have a feeling I'll be reaching for all summer, for birthday cards, notepaper, and the prettiest hand-printed wrapping paper.

Each design began as an original lino cut in my studio. Cutting strawberries into lino is a particular pleasure — the leaves want to be a little wild, the berries a little rounded, and once they're printed you can see the marks of the cut along the stems and around the tops of the fruit. That's what gives a hand-printed image its life.

Two-colour stamping, no faff

Both the plant and the border come with two separate strawberry stamps you ink in red and press on top of the green leaves. It's the easiest possible way to get a polished two-colour print — no tricky alignment, no smudging, just pop the strawberries on and the whole design comes to life. Lovely for beginners and a satisfying shortcut for experienced stampers.

The designs

• Strawberry Plant — 8 × 7.5 cm
• Strawberry Border — 13 × 3.5 cm
• Snail, Left-facing — 5.5 × 2.5 cm
• Snail, Right-facing — 5.5 × 2.5 cm

A few ways to use them

Make a complete hand-printed writing set — run the border along the top and bottom of a sheet of notepaper, stamp the matching border around the flap of the envelope, and tuck a snail (left- or right-facing) into the corner. It's the kind of gift a letter-writer will treasure, especially with a few sheets of envelope and paper bundled with twine.

The border also works beautifully around all four edges of a 14 × 14 cm card for a strawberry-framed summer birthday note. Use the plant on its own at the foot of a folded card, or repeat it down a sheet of notepaper. And the border makes a gorgeous repeat along a length of brown kraft wrapping paper.

Ink pads used in the sample image

I stamped the sample using Free Oasis and Strawberry VersaFine Clair ink pads on 14 × 14 cm card stock.