How to Keep Photopolymer Stamps from Staining (so much)

A friend was just asking me on the phone about how to clean Archival Ink off of a stamp.  But we don’t know what kind of stamp since the person asking her was asking in a text.  Ahhh, technology.

But another question popped into my mind that I can answer and I think it’s a very important one.  NEVER clean your photopolymer stamps with StazOn cleaner.  There’s something in the formulation of that cleaner that will erode the photopolymer and ruin your stamp.  A stained stamp is not a ruined stamp.  It’s just stained.  And it won’t pass the color on to your project.

A suggestion that I read “somewhere” that will help keep a fresh unused photopolymer  stamps unstained is to ink it up and stamp with a light colored ink like So Saffron or Soft Sky and stamp it on your scrap paper.  Do that several times.  Clean stamp.  Then go ahead and ink up your stamp with a darker color and stamp on your card/project and clean it as usual with Stampin’ Mist.  The darker ink will not stain your stamp–or it will not stain as much as if it was the first ink put on the virgin stamp.

Just a reminder:  the stain on the stamp is just that–only a stain.  It can be considered ‘ugly’ or it can just be ignored since the functionality of the stamp is still just fine.