Stamps of Approval : 16,000 rubber sharks, feet and Joan Crawfords bounce around Placentia home and help create custom cards.

When Kathy Lewis stamps a letter, she really stamps it. Along with the 29-cent variety, she takes rubber stamps to her mail, and not just a cute little ink blot here and there. By the time she’s done, the whole envelope is a fanciful artwork, and the poor letter carrier is lucky to find the address.

On one envelope, most of the address side is filled with a green lawn--that’s right, she has rubber stamps of lawns--with an overhead view of a person puttering along with a lawn mower, and part of the address is spelled out by its swath of cut grass.

“I swear the postal people must pass them around before they deliver them because they take longer than other mail does,” said Lewis, married and a mother of three who teaches math at Cal State Fullerton. Nice, normal stuff, that, and she doesn’t look particularly obsessed. But then they rarely do, these folks who turn out to have rooms full of heads, arms and torsos.

Fortunately, hers are all on rubber stamps, along with feet, pies, rocks, sharks, shrubs, french fries, bones, Joan Crawford, six-packs, 25 different suns and just about everything else under them. She estimates she has some $100,000 worth of stamps, maybe 16,000 in all, filling one room of the house and spilling into others.

She has nearly the whole world reproduced in rubber, along with “these awful stamps I’ve got to have because I just might need them.” Once she was sending a custom-made get-well card to a chameleon at a local pet store where she had just purchased an overabundance of meal worms. Out came her stamp of “worms in clam sauce” to show the store she’d found a use for the crawlers.

Along with those done for family and friends, she makes custom cards for everyone from her pool contractor to postal workers--”they’re friendlier about hand-canceling the letters then”--to strangers. There is a growing network of rubber-stamp artists, and if Lewis sees something she likes, she’ll sometimes send that artist some of her work, and it gets to be a near-wordless correspondence.

She pulled out a fanciful rubber-stamped diorama--complete with the Hollywood Hills, Cadillacs, Elvis and a blimp--that someone in Texas had just sent her.

“It’s a little odd. You spend all this time making some wonderful thing and then send it off to some complete stranger,” she said. “You try to surprise them with stamps they’ve never seen or new ways of using them. And then you go to your mailbox and, in return, these great things are there.

“The mail art is really the big thing for me. I may make 20 pieces a week, and usually receive about three pieces a day now. When there isn’t any, it’s depressing.”

Along with the mystery mail, she has made some of her best friends through rubber stamping, she said.

“I’d say there’s three major things in your life that change the friends you have: When you get married, you start hanging around married people; then you have children and you’re around people with children; then you start rubber stamps and your whole group of friends changes to include many rubber stampers.”

Six years ago, Lewis started with some 30 rubber stamps, picked up while buying quilting materials at a crafts supply shop. Then she heard of a Costa Mesa shop specializing in them.

Recognizing her obsessive nature, “I took a bunch of cash with me, $400, thinking there was no way I’d need more rubber stamps than that. I grabbed a couple of buckets and started filling them up with the stamps I liked most. I went to check out, and it was $600. I thought, Wow! and pulled out my charge card and bought them.

“Driving home on the freeway, you’d think I’d be saying, ‘What have I done? $600 in rubber stamps!’ But instead I was going, ‘Oh, I should have got that one and this one.’ I was only worried about the ones I didn’t get. I came home and couldn’t sleep and started stamping with them, and they were so great that within a week I started going back, spending $600, $300, $700. Within six weeks I’d spent about $3,000.”

Lewis said her husband, Bill, a mechanical engineer with the Fluor Corp., has been supportive of her hobby. She also said she was initially careful not to tell him how much she was spending.

She finally started worrying about the expense herself, realizing that she just didn’t have the money to buy all she wanted. So she began hosting Tupperware-like rubber-stamp parties in homes, which, for starters, allowed her to buy her stamps wholesale. The parties proved ridiculously successful for a while, she said, until the craze caught on to the degree that it took off on the retail level (several county shops now specialize in rubber stamps, and there’s Placentia’s Museum of Modern Rubber).

She supports her habit by spending two weekends a month in Santa Barbara teaching crafts classes at Stampa Barbara, the world’s largest rubber-stamp retailer. She also comes close to being the store’s biggest customer, according to owner and friend Gary Dorothy.

“She may not be the most nuts, but she’s right in the upper echelon of being nuts,” he said.

Lewis’ enthusiasm and creativity in new ways to use the stamps, he said, have resulted in her classes drawing rubber adherents from as far away as Australia and South Africa, who schedule their vacations around her workshops.

The workshops have been so successful, Lewis said, that “it has become my serious job. My real job used to be at Cal State Fullerton. I used to have two classes teaching math, but with the budget cuts I only have one, so we rely on the income from my stamping now.”

Stampa Barbara has a mailing list of 30,000, and there are magazines, such as the Oregon-published Rubber Stamp Madness, devoted to rubber-stamp art. Lewis has created covers for the magazine and for stamp manufacturers’ catalogues. She is able to get some of her stamps for free by making fanciful display samples of what can be done with them.

Though it has become a business for her, she is passionate about the hobby side of it. She still likes nothing better than coming up with new, more complex ways to use the stamps artistically, sharing those techniques with pen pals. Often they present each other with challenges; for example, all making works based on the same comic punch line, or sending different objects to be decorated. Lewis is working on stamping a piece of bark one correspondent sent her.

While other rubber dubbers tend to specialize in stamp art ranging from cute to weird, Lewis likes all of it, from gilt-inked Victorian hearts to macabre guillotine scenes rolling in disembodied heads.

She thinks stamping has grown to be a cult phenomenon because, “it’s a communication thing, where people are eager for some personalization in their lives. To get these things in the mail that someone’s hand-done with time and effort makes you feel kind of special. I’m a frustrated artist. And people who want to communicate things that are personal (who) can’t necessarily do original artwork can do it with stamps.”