How Not to Cut a Craft Foam Stamp

I just spent the last hour transferring and cutting out this letter. It did not go well. N is for Nope. Nay. Not.
This tangle of yellow foam is all I have left to show for my first cut and mounted letter. Any other person would have chosen a simple letter, but no - I have to pick one with skinny legs and 15 cutouts.

I printed my letter in reverse, cut away the excess paper and taped the image to the foam side of a single thickness of craft foam. Cutting out the actual letter with a relatively new Exacto blade was pretty easy. Cutting out 15 little sections took forever and the results were clearly the work of a novice.

The next step was to mount this floppy, sticky contraption onto Plexiglas. Fail. The industrial strength adhesive on the back of this batch of foam made handing, placing & repositioning out of the question. Any attempt caused stretching and tearing. I gave up, pulled as much foam as I could off of the Plexi, rolled it up in a ball and considered plan B.

This time, I printed the letter right facing and taped it to the paper side of two layers of craft foam. Made the large straight cuts. Wow. This is a nice, firm stamp. The skinny legs don't even flop. This thing will last forever and should be way easier to mount. Kind of like the pros have demonstrated during my research?

The next challenge was to cut these shapes and not ruin this gorgeous new stamp. I tried heat carving some scrap using two different tips. Both left a ragged edge and created a dubious trail of melt-smoke. I did figure out removing only one layer of foam would result in a recess deep enough to keep from filling with ink when rolled.

This time, I used a glue stick to adhere the reversed image to the foam side of the stamp. I cut through one layer (often grabbing two) then peeled off the cuts. Really, if I hadn't been too lazy to look for a new blade, this might have gone better. It took forever and while the results were passable, they were far from professional.

In our process, every imperfection in a stamp becomes part of the image. I may find that thick and opaque textile inks make this not matter, but I'd rather just learn how to cut a clean stamp.

Plan C:  A simple font. Right facing image attached to the paper backing with a glue stick. Two layers of craft foam. One sharp Exacto blade. TTYL.