A personalised fimo wax seal stamp

Make this fimo wax seal stamp to finish your letters with your own personalised seal

I’m really excited to show you how I made my own fimo wax seal stamp. I love the extra touch this kind of wax seal gives to a sealed envelope, so I decided to make my own out of fimo, a polymer clay that you can mould, then fire in an oven to harden.

I actually made this as a gift for my boss, at Testamento. We did a secret santa gift exchange at Christmas, with a budget of 5€, and I managed to make the seal, and buy a stick of sealing wax from L’Ecritoire for well within the budget. I made a little paper origami box to finish it off, and here is the finished product. Pretty cool for a 5€ present, right?

Depending on the design you pick and how you choose to mould it, this can be either a really easy project, or quite fiddly, but the best thing is that in any case it will be really cheap. I used one single pack of fimo to make mine, which cost less than 2€. If you want to use several colours, it will cost a little more than this, but you would still use roughly the same amount of clay overall, so that would just leave you some extra fimo for a second stamp, or some other fun crafty project. Yay!

The entire stamp is made with the polymer clay, but the actual stamp design is made as a disk, and the handle is made separately. I then glued the two together only once they had been hardened in the oven.

To make the disk with you stamp design. Take a piece of clay about the size of a cherry tomato. Warm it up by kneading it with your hands until it is relatively soft and has an even consistency, then roll it into a ball.

Roll this ball out onto a flat surface to make a flat disk of about 5mm thick. Roll the ball in different directions to keep the disk as round as possible. At least, I made mine round, but you could try a slightly oval shape by rolling just one way, or even cut the edges off to make a diamond, square or any other shape.

Once your disk is rolled out, and is nice and flat, you can begin creating your design. If you want to keep this as simple as possible, you can press a shaped bead, button or charm into the disk to impress a pattern into your disk.

I wanted to make my own personalised text, so it was a little more complicated :

I started by drawing the stamp I wanted on a piece of paper at the right scale (about 3cm diameter) with a pencil.

I then turned this paper over and put it onto a fresh piece of paper. I then scribbled over the whole design, from the other side of the paper, making sure to press hard over every part of the design. This transfers the design onto the new paper, but as a mirror image, so that when stamped, it will be the right way around.

I then put this paper over my rolled out disk of fimo. The design now needed to be transferred onto the fimo itself, or at least the basic outline of the design, so I could model the details. To transfer the design to the fimo I used a needle to prick loads of little holes through the paper, but only where the text was on my design. This allowed me to mark where the text would go, so once I took away the paper, I could begin to carve out these letters. I used a toothpick and the needle to do this. Working slowly, and carefully to remove small amounts of the clay, and create the grooves for each letter. Pay attention to how deep the groves are as well as how wide, as this will be visible in the final wax seals you make with the stamp. It is a bit like a mini, inside out sculpture.

Once I’d finished with the design, I gave it one final light roll, just to make sure the surface was flat.

To make the handle, I took the rest of the fimo and rolled it between my hands to warm it up.

Once it had an even consistency, I rolled it into a sausage shape.

I flattened off one end of this shape by pressing it against a hard flat surface, and rounded off the other end and shaped the sides into a handle shape by rolling the fimo evenly between my fingers. Keep rolling and pressing until you have a shape you are happy with, with a flat surface on one end that is roughly the same size as your disk.

It is at this stage, that you might want to use other colours of fimo clay to decorate the handle. You could create decorative shapes in different colours and roll them into the handle, or stick them around the edges. I added a few gold stripes around my handle with paint after the cooking process, but you could recreate the same effect with fimo stripes before cooking your stamp.

To cook, put both the disk and the handle on greaseproof paper, on a flat surface. Cook the clay, following the instructions on the packet. For my fimo, it was 30 minutes at 110°C.

When you take the fimo out of the oven, it will still be a little soft, and will harden as it cools, so make sure to leave it on a flat surface while it cools.

Once the fimo has been cooked and cooled. I glued the disk to my fimo wax seal stamp. I sanded slightly the two flat edges slightly, and used super glue to fix them together.

Once glued, I then painted a few stripes on the handle with gold acrylic paint to add a decorative touch.

You can see the wax seal made using this stamp above. To make the seal, I used wax bought from l’Écritoire.

Here is another fimo wax seal stamp that I made for Paris en Rose. If you don’t want to try making your own stamp, you should still take a look at l’Ecritoire, on rue Saint-Martin. Its a really cute little shop selling ink pens, stationery and wax seals, so you can always buy your wax seal stamp there instead!