Ink pads for bookplate stamps
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With the plethora of ink pads available online, I thought I'd shed some light on what I think are the best ink pads in the market for book stamping!
Fleur & Fable's entire ink pad range is from Tsukineko, a Japanese brand specialising in beautifully saturated ink pads.
Versafine Clair Range
Bright, bold, oil-based, pigment ink colours. The crème de la crème of ink pads. Pigment ink means it's opaque with pigment suspended in oil suitable for finely etched stamps. It does however mean that they take a little longer to dry than other inks but for the vibrancy, crispness you can't beat the quality. Beyond use for book stamping, because it's oil based ink you can use it for mixed media craft projects if you like to paint watercolours on top. Fleur & Fable stocks the entire range for $16 each.
Versafine Clair Warm Breeze (left) and Green Oasis (right)
Memento Range
These ink pads are formulated with dye ink which means it's water-based with pigments mixed with water, making them slightly translucent stamped. The advantage is it dries almost immediately. In this range there's the Dew Drop size mini ink pads which feature a pointed tip perfect for selectively colour/stamping the rubber surface of your book stamp. Get creative with multi-coloured bookplates! Fleur & Fable only carries 5 full sized colours ($12) and 10 dew drop sizes ($5.50), subject to what's available.
Bookplate stamp in Pear Tart and Lilac Posies.
Brilliance Range: This range contains metallic gold and silver colours as pigment ink!
An advantage with all the ink pads is that they come with a raised ink well so no matter the size of your rubber stamp it will still fit the ink pad.
A common question we get is if our ink pads can be used on glossy pages - the answer is YES they can! I would still advise to give ample time for the page to dry to not smudge the ink.
One thing you can't really avoid when using bookplate stamps is the ink bleeding through the page - this is due to the thin book pages (rather than the ink quality.
Get stamping with new ink pad colours here!
Jessica Le is the founder of Fleur & Fable. She writes about bookplates and is a member of The New Australian Bookplate Society.
☛ info@fleurandfable.com.au
