Peter Pauper Press is a company known primarily for their budget decorative journals and notecards, but they also produce a line of art supplies under the Studio Series range. They released a new product last year; a box of 15 ink pads which retail at $10.99 USD (I paid $15.99 for mine here in Canada). I have a lot of stamps and $1 an ink pad seemed like a good deal to me. There is also a great range of colours in the box.
Generally I buy the more expensive Color Box inks, and I also have several studio g inks, which are a budget brand from Michaels (I’m a sucker for those impulse purchases near the checkout…) and a little smaller but comparable in price to these new ink pads. One thing to note though is that both of those brands, being pigment-based, can be used for embossing and will show to a greater or lesser degree on dark coloured papers. The Studio Series inks are dye-based so usage is more limited for paper crafts. This information is not written on the packaging and I had to look on their website to confirm. On the plus side they are labelled as being suitable for paper, fabric, or wood.
I’ll be testing just a couple of colours for this review, mainly because I don’t want to open up all of the packages and have them dry out before I get a chance to use them up – in my experience the budget brands don’t have the longest shelf life. So I’m going to test black, orange, neon pink, and gold, which is a selection of the broad colour groups included (dark, light, neon, and metallic).
I made some little swatches by sweeping the pad across the paper – it’s regular printer paper, not too thick and fairly smooth. The first thing that I noticed was that the pads seemed a little dry, but the more I used them the more inky they became, so I think that they just needed to get going. As you can see, the ink colours are not too far from the pad colour. Perhaps a little less bright, but the saturation is good. Well, it was good on the non-metallic colours; the gold was a little disappointing in the swatch, but looked better when stamped.
The leaf stamp on the left is a traditional rubber stamp, while the more detailed mushroom stamp on the right is silicone. The pink was too inky for the detail, but this may also be coupled with the fact that both the stamp and ink pad have low relief, so it’s difficult to ink it effectively. If I were to print it on a more textured paper I imagine that it would feather badly, but I’ve found that to be the case with most dye-based ink pads. As expected, the ink ghosted through to the other side of the paper and this would likely be the case on everything but thick cardstock.
 I even found the gold inked well. It looks quite dull when viewed from above, but glimmers well when it catches the light. It would be nice to use it as a highlighter over another colour to give your print some sparkle. The black ink provided the sharpest print, with the most detail and the least feathering.
Next up I tested it on fabric. Lacking anything white I had to use a light beige bedsheet that I had lying around in my scrap fabric basket. All of the colours actually showed well. I used only the least detailed stamp as I was concerned that the detail would just bleed away with the other one. The slightly drier ink pads were probably beneficial here as they dried quickly and preserved a sharp print.
I wanted to give it plenty of time to dry so left it overnight, then I heat set one side with an iron to see if this would make any difference to the outcome, and hand washed both samples (with a little bit of rubbing) in lukewarm water.
I’m happy to admit that I was very pleasantly surprised with the results!  All of the colours aside from the gold fared well. There was no real fading or running on either sample; both image and colour stayed sharp, although the colours in the heat set side look marginally better (right hand side of the fabric). The best way of describing the gold is to call it a pale glittery shadow. I had to tilt it into the light to get the detail you can see in the photo on the right. I’d have to experiment some more to see if they would have the longevity for garments that went into the laundry now and then, but they would be definitely suitable for craft projects where minimal washing was required.
Overall I think that these inks are a great deal for the price. I’d like to try them out on wood but don’t have anything suitable at the moment – I plan to decorate a few small wooden boxes for a future project, so might provide a little update then.
Pros: Great price, good colour saturation, clear print on ‘regular’ paper, staying power on fabric.
Cons: Metallic ink didn’t perform so well, pads were a little dry to begin with.
I’d really like to see more inks from Peter Pauper in future, and would welcome a set of pigment inks for embossing if the price and quality could be kept comparable to this set.
I never thought I’d find reading about stamp applications this fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing this product testing.