Organizing My Stamps

I had purchased some of the stamp storage sheets from Stamper's Best when I bought my birthday presents there. I bought them because when I was doing my Christmas cards I found it was hard to look at everything that might go together since I had the stamps separated by theme on CD cases (such as all the Christmas decorations in one case and all the Christmas trees in another). I found, after doing all the cards, that I had missed one of the stamps from a Stampin' Up set because I hadn't thought to look in one of the cases. Because of this, I decided I wanted to try organizing a different way and the storage cards seemed like a good idea, it would make it easy to flip through all my stamps. I discovered, as I was organizing stamps onto those first cards I bought, that some of the clear stamps I own had started sticking to the CD cases, almost bonding to them, so I decided to move all my stamps to the storage cards.

I put the storage cards in 12 x 12 page protectors so that if a stamp comes off, it won't get lost. The pages themselves fit in 8 1/2 x 11 page protectors but when I put any stamp mounted on foam cling on the pages, they no longer fit. I only ruined one stamp taking them out of the CD cases, which was a really small number, given how many stamps I own. I had previously, a few years ago, ruined a couple stamps when they stuck to the CD cases, but somehow had never connected that the CD cases were causing the issue back then.

I bought both the clear and colored storage sheets for my birthday to see which ones I liked better. I like the colored sheets better. They are a little thinner than the clear sheets, since they are laminated cardstock but it was hard to tell what clear stamps looked like if there were some on each side of the clear sheets. It didn't take nearly as long as I thought it might to change the stamps from the cases to the sheets, which was nice.

I bought this organizing rack at Costco to organize my bills, but found that I only had 2 folders I needed to use, so I decided to use this organizing rack for my stamps and use a smaller organizer I had sitting in my craft room not being used for bills. I also am going to use a paper holder I had siting around from Cropper Hopper (like this one) since I have a few more pages that aren't in the holder above and trying to force them into it made it too hard to be able to flip through the pages.

Some of my saying stamps. The computer is from Stampin' Up's Computer Quips set. We're all computer geeks in my house so when I saw it a few years ago in the catalog, I knew I had to get it.

Some of my animal stamps. My husband loves polar bears, so I bought these two polar bear stamps years ago when I saw them. The blue stamps are from The Angel Company, which I understand went out of business. That's too bad, I really like their stamps.

I've been buying a lot of costume stuff for Steampunk costumes, so I've also been buying gears and Steampunk related stamps. I even made a Steampunk Mardi Gras mask at a mask creating party before our friends' Mardi Gras party this year (I put a picture of it at the bottom of this blog post in case anyone wants to see my mask). These are my gear/Steampunk stamps with shape and scrapbook related stamps behind them.

My flower stamps with flourish stamps behind them. I mounted some of my clear flower stamps (from the Build a Flower set by Katie Pertier and marketed by Autumn Leaves) on foam cling so I could use them with a stamping gear by Inkadinkado I bought at Joann's. (This round set is the one I got.) I tried the stamps on with the gear without them mounted on foam cling, but because there's a raised area at the edge of the block where it attaches to the gear, it didn't work because the stamps were below that raised area. I think the gear is perfect for getting the petals exactly where I want them, so I mounted just the petals on the foam cling. I over-estimated how much foam cling I needed last year when I was replacing the tack-it-over-and-over glue I was using to coat the back of my unmounted rubber stamps to get them to adhere to the stamping blocks, so I had plenty left to do this small project.

My food and liquor related stamps.

This is how many CD cases full of stamps I used to have. I bought 23 storage sheets between the two orders and I already had one storage sheet I had gotten for free last year with an order, so I have 24 storage sheets. I think I still have one empty one, so this whole CD tower was consolidated down to 23 storage sheets. Not bad!

The mask I made at our friends' Mardi Gras Party

Me in the mask I made, wearing one of my corsets and a bolero jacket I bought to go with my corsets.