what to do when stamps get hardened

[sherlaw99]

Does anyone have a suggestion of how to soften their stamps that have aged and hardened and/or gotten sticky? I have always carefully cleaned my stamps and yet this has happened.
thanks in advance for any help

[JBgreendawn]

what is the material the stamps are made from? ( if they are pure foam such as the MM alphabets I am thinking next step is crumbling and nothing I tried saved mine)
but, if they are rubber.

you can find glycerin in the beauty dept. of most stores ( near the pharmacy) and try putting some in a shallow thing ( old butter tub lid?) and placing the stamp rubber down into that. ( it does not work as well as the rubber conditioner stuff sold to guys for their cars but, that stuff is at home hiding in the garage and it would be tonight before I could poke hubs to finding it so I could tell you what its called)

[UnderstandBlue]

For rubber stamps I get from Ebay etc. that seem to have a shiny, sticky surface, a good session with UltraClean usually does the trick!

[JBgreendawn]

The name of the stuff for conditioning rubber is made by a company called adamspolishes.com - VRT vinyl, rubber & tire protectant. What I did was I bought some used stamps that were very old and very hard as a rock brittle rubber so, I put the stamp on a lid to a old coffee can and dabbed with a shop rag the vrt onto the rubber and let it sit, and it absorbed part of it, I ended up doing this 3 or 4 times and then I was able to push my finger into the rubber and have some give to it again. I did it in the garage so, I don't know if I remember how many fumes it had.

[JBgreendawn]

Its not a perfect solution the thing is though sometimes when you buy used stamp you don't know how the first person kept them so, you don't really know what you are getting until you try to stamp it.

[Maus]

I have had good results using SU!'s stamp cleaner and misting some on the stamp and letting it soak in. Since it has a conditioner in it, the stamp seems to renew itself.

[kmt1000]

I've been using baby wipes for years and my rubber stamps are still good as new. Probably the glycerin in them?