SHERYL'S CRAFTS AND HALOS RUBBER STAMPS!!
I have loved making things for most of my life. Before that, I admired things other people made and longed for the supplies and machines so that I could be creative too.
I remember going to church bazaars as a child and seeing wonderful handmade items, but they were so expensive. I participated in 4-H and learned to sew, and added to the talent in junior high, high school and college sewing classes. We didn't have a sewing machine, so I used a treadle machine that an elderly neighbor shared with me. My father had passed away when I was 12 and my mother was raising the 3 youngest children alone, so money was tight!
When I became a mother, I wanted to stay at home and raise our children, but I knew I would need to be able to earn money to help supplement my husband's teaching income. I bought a sewing machine and sewed flags for the State Road Department where I had worked as a secretary for several years while Gary finished his degree. I literally wore the sewing machine out! We were married for 3 years while going to college and had hoped to have a baby as soon as possible.
We had applied for adoption and were anxious to start our family. We were excited when, within a week of my husband starting his first year of teaching, we received a call from the adoption agency and were thrilled to welcome our first daughter. We named her LeeAnn, a combination of our two middle names....within 17 months, I gave birth to another daughter, Kimberly. It took another 4 years for our first son to arrive and then about every 4 years, we were blessed with another baby, the last when I was almost 40.
I wanted to sew for my children, so my husband sold his motorcyle and bought me the best sewing machine on the market! I designed some unique products for my own children and found an outlet to sell them at Mormon Handicraft and area botiques. My house became a factory and I worked late at night and early in the morning in order to spend time and keep up with the 6 children that eventually joined our family.
At these local shows, I saw many beautiful art rubber stamps. Some time before this time, I remember being fascinated with the plastic alphabet stamps in the toy stores. As I continued to sew, I wished for a way to decorate the items I made and thought rubber stamps might be the answer. One day I woke up with excruciating pain in my left leg and back and I learned that all the hours spent sitting, twisting, and sewing had herniated a disc. While I recuperated from back surgery, I could no longer sit and sew.
My husband was a high school shop teacher and had access to lots of wood, and he was an artist as well. As I had earned money sewing, I invested in lots of craft supplies and machines. A vulcanizer (a machine used to manufacture rubber stamps) was one of my early purchases. My husband could get all the wood I needed for free, but there was a big problem....space! I wondered if I could figure out a way to be able to use the same mount on a variety of stamps. Hook and loop tape (like Velcro) was a sewing product I used and I thought it would be a great idea to use on rubber stamps. I also tried a variety of things like removeable glues, magnets, and temporary glues, but there were disadvantages with storage for all these methods.
Eventually the wood went by the wayside, as I thought of using acrylic blocks as the mount. My husband made recessed grooves in which we placed strips of hook tape. These attached to the thicker loop tape on the stamp. This provided wonderful cushioning. Now the images could be seen and positioned easily.
We were way ahead of our time! In the early nineties, unmounted stamps were not popular with people who had already invested hundreds...even thousands of dollars, on wood mounted stamps. When it became too costly to have the acrylic mounts manufactured and keep them affordably priced for wholesale, my husband purchased the equipment and made the mounts himself. We had participated in a QVC 50 state show long before they had craft days and a crafting audience. Our segment was on late at night against the World Series on another channel, and they had bumped it up a week, so the few word of mouth contacts we had told were not able to see the segment. That could have been the end of HALOS because we had manufactured an enormous amount of kits that were returned to us! We then went "on the road" teaching stampers to use HALOS. People who had few stamps and had wanted more and more, LOVED our products. However, there were very few unmounted stamps available for people to purchase. People were buying the wooden stamps and taking them off the mounts and putting them on HALOS.
This was not a popular thing for the stamp stores because there were no unmounted stamps available at wholesale prices for them to purchase for resale, and because they made twice as much money or more on wood mounted stamps and finally, there was no really good way to display unmounted stamps.
We loved traveling to shows and demonstrating our invention and it became so busy, my husband took a 3 year early retirement from teaching school. We enjoyed the shows and before long, many companies were offering their stamps in unmounted sheets of rubber.
Over the years, I had reinvested my earnings in purchasing a number of rubber stamp companies. We took our designs to shows and people loved our stamps, but we were too busy manufacturing, demonstrating, and wholesaling HALOS that we never had time to get our stamps online or make a catalogue that had all the stamps we own or have the unmounted rights to!
Now unmounted stamps are huge and there are a variety of ways to mount them and have them be interchangeable! We've tried them all, and still love HALOS best, but competition is good and we're proud to have been a "pioneer" in bringing affordable stamping to thousands of people.
We look forward to sharing HALOS and our wonderful images to a much larger audience than we were able to while doing the shows! My favorite line of all is the Azadi line. She is an amazing artist--one of the very first and most well known artists of rubber stamps. She was the inspiration for many lines of stamps, but she will always be my favorite! She was a neighbor of mine and when I approached her about selling unmounted stamps, her wood mounted stamps were being manufactured and sold all over the world. She was unable to allow them to be sold unmounted. Years later, I was able to purchase the unmounted rights to these amazing images.
We are now at a point that we can no longer travel to shows, and the time is finally right to get our images online! I'm learning to do my own web pages! Stay tuned for some amazing stamps and products!
Another reason we never had time to sell the stamps is because we had so many images that it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. There was not enough room to organize thousands of individual images. That is why sheets of rubber have been so popular for many companies. We love rubber sheets and offer some of our Azadi images on sheets, but we will also be offering individual images for those who prefer them that way.
Did I mention I love machines? I don't know why I love machines, but I think it's because of the professional results that can be obtained, and the fun things they can do! Besides making sure all of my 5 daughters had sewing machines before they left home, I have so many fun machines that I literally have never used most of them. The ones that most fascinated me were the ones that could be used with rubber stamps! I was one of the first to have a Xyron, and didn't stop until I had about 5 different sizes, including one for poster board! Another machine I invested in when only schools and a few stores had them, was a die cut machine! I loved Accucut! The rolling action was what I loved best. Now I have at least 5 different sizes and kinds of die cut machines and hundreds of dies.
The HALOS name originally came from the first letter in
Hooked And Looped On Stamps, but it can also be for Have A Lot of Stamps, Helps A Lot of Stampers, and HALOS Has A Lot of Stuff! My dream is to have a place where people can come and create. I have collected so many things to create with, that none of our vehicles has ever been in any of the garages. There has been one exception. We made room to squeeze in the latest toy that I insisted my husband buy--a beautiful black Harley Davidson motorcycle. You may have remember that my husband sold the motorcylce we purchased early in our marriage, to buy me a sewing machine and I love riding behind him as much as any of my own machines :)