I spent quite a while deciding what word to choose from for this task. After spending so much time playing Wordle, I had a lot of five letter words coming to mind. Ocean- too curvy. Green- no double letters. Liver- too random. I decided to do the word “world” for my stamp because the letters contain mostly straight lines…plus I was staring at a globe. The first stamp took me longer to carve out than the second one because I learned a few tricks after doing it once, and in total it probably took about 15-20 minutes to carve them both out. Luckily my neighbour is an artist so I was able to use some of her paint so I could actually see how well my stamps work…not realizing until after that my word comes out backward! Of course it does! I was so wrapped up in the process of choosing the perfect word and carving the potato that I completely overlooked the most important aspect- will my stamp produce what I want it to- a legible word.

This made me think back to the days of the printing press and wonder, did they have to place all of their letters backwards in order to produce their prints? They must have, and it would have made the already arduous task of hand laying and pressing each text that much more time consuming and difficult. What about typewriters? Are all of those letter stamps backwards too? I think I’ll stick to handwriting and computer typing.