Let’s Talk – Stamp Storage!

And again with the stamp theme… 🙂
(see T-Shirt Tuesday – Eat, Sleep, Stamp and HOT New Stamps!)

Stamps come in all shapes and sizes: wood mounted, foam, foam mounted to plastic, acrylic, unmounted rubber… you get the idea! So let’s talk about how to store them.

Most of the stamps I have are acrylic with a growing number of unmounted rubber stamps. I found it difficult to keep the acrylic stamps in the original packaging and was showed by a friend how to store them in clear cd cases. I loved the idea and really ran with it!

I had a wooden cd tower from my college days so I recruited it to store the cd cases. I labeled the ends of the cd cases with the brand and the name of the stamp collection. If you look closely you can also see a couple rubber mounted stamp cases in the tower also (about halfway down). Those stamps came with their own case, but there’s no reason you could not put them in a cd case for storage.

This collection of stamps fit quite nicely in the cd case. I simple cut the plastic that the stamps were attached to in half and attached one to each side of the case. Attaching the plastic backing to the cd case allows you to clearly see the stamps that are inside quickly.

The white arrows are pointing at the strips of adhesive I used to attach the plastic sheet to the case. Just two strips of adhesive. That’s it!

Some of my stamp sets are too large to simply cut the plastic backing in half. For my jungle animals stamps I had to actually cut out the backing of each stamp and adhere it to the cd case and arrange it so they all would fit.

Here is a better picture of the stamps organized in the cd case.

These stamps do not have the plastic backing with them, but they still stick great to the cd case. You just can’t see as clearly from the outside of the case which stamps are inside.

For the most part, I like to keep my stamp collections together inside each cd case. I don’t like for them to mingle. I can find what I’m looking for if the collections stay together. But if I have various word stamps, I’ll put them all together. For my random small stamps, I keep them a little differently. I store them in a small clear jar (see below.)

As I use these stamps I tend to keep them out of their wrapping. As you can see, I have several stamps I need to use!

As for my wood mounted stamps, I store them in a plastic bin. I tried to keep them somewhat organized but quickly gave that up. For my foam stamps, they are also in a random plastic bin.

So, how do you store your stamps?

————————————-

So you might remember last month I showed you a 12 month album about my son’s first year. I just finished his 11th month and wanted to share. I can’t believe he’s going to be 1 this week! Time really does fly by. I plan to put this album out at his birthday party next weekend so everyone can see how much he as grown (and ooh and ah over how cute is). 😉