Since I've been moving my studio/workroom from the attic to the main floor, I've also been re-thinking some of the ways I store, organize and index my "stuff".
I thought that I had shared my new stamp storage method, but I can't find a post in my archives, so maybe I was waiting until I finished, instead of sharing mid-project or something. If this is old information, I apologize - consider it a reminder, I guess...
ANYway - I was tired of having multiple methods and containers and what-have-you for the different types of stamps (photpolymer, rubber, etc.) I read somewhere about someone using laminated folders, cut down to fit in envelopes, to store their unmounted stamps on. That was the seed that grew into my current method of storing stamps.
I bought a slew of the laminated folders when WalMart was having their back-to-school sales and they were CHEAP! I cut them down into 4" x 6" cards (about seven per folder) and bought these Iris photo keepers, because envelopes sounded like too much work to find something to put them in:
The "keeper" contains 16 individual cases, and each case will hold seven fully loaded cards. Here's an example of what the cards look like:
I have them all organized by category, and each case is labelled (P-Touch labelmaker) with the category of the stamps inside. When I took this picture, I still had some of the stamps in their sets, but have since split everything up - Christmas trees all together, Santas all together, snowmen all together, etc.
If/when Greg and I decide to be nomads and travel around in an RV instead of living in a real house, my stamps are now portable if I put them in the keepers. In the meantime, however, I've done this with them:
This is a 60" shelf on the wall in my "new" room. The "cubbies" are CD crates on their sides with a strip of molding (I think it's baseboard. I found it in the garage, it was the right length and I was too impatient to get in my car and drive to Home Depot to get a real board - Greg doesn't know I swiped it...yet). Obviously, the cases on the bottom row are taller than the CD crates, so a little ingenuity was in order. I have an entire box (the file storage kind) full of blocks that were intended for mounting rubber stamps, and they will NEVER be used for that purpose, so I took a few that were the right dimensions to support the top "shelf". Here are a few more details:
This CD crate houses small alphabet sets. The blue and green box is Stampin'Up! Little Letters, the box below is a Hero Arts harlequin stamp set. The three ammo boxes contain EK Success small alphabets (four different ones). These little alphas work best for me on the little wood "pegs" that they're on, so this is my answer, storage-wise. The clamshell case above them is my JustRite monogram stamper and one of the circle sets.
These clamshell cases contain background and other over-sized stamps. Above them are three JustRite pre-inked stamp thingies, and a couple of eensy teensy stamps from Sweet Stamps that I haven't made up my mind about storage-wise yet.
I have most of my inks elsewhere in the room (stories for another day), but these are a few overflow Stampin'Up! ink pads and my Versamark pads. The VHS case above them has some foam Christmas sentiment stamps that I'm convinced I'll get around to using for something someday...
Just inside the door of my room is a litle niche created when we bumped the wall out to expand our bathroom, and a DVD rack fits there perfectly. It houses my unmounted wheel stamps (no longer "wheels", obviously) and other border stamps that are too long to fit in the photo cases. Large alphabet sets (Close to My Heart and Inkadinkado, mostly) are here, as well. They are in the DVD-style cases from Stampin'Up!:
That's the scoop on the storage aspect! Moving on to the indexing... I have two notebooks that have pictures of every stamp set I own in them, arranged alphabetically by manufacturer. I'm keeping those, obviously, but wanted an index that had the stamps arranged in categories to mirror the way they're stored now. I got an idea from THIS GIRL, but tweaked it a bit. She stamped each image on a separate card. If I did that, I'd need about twenty notebooks - not happening! I opted to do "like with like", with as many images as would comfortably fit on a card without crowding or making it hard to see each image easily:
Now I can see all of my options when I need a specific word or image, and compare them size-wise and style-wise to see which will work best:
I stamped them in gray because it's not quite as stark as black and it's easier to clean up, but it's still neutral enough to leave my imagination free to fill in with the color of my project.
Lest you think that I'm all THAT, let me assure you - I'm at the beginning of this indexing project, and have - to date - completed only TWO of the SIXTY-FOUR cases you saw on the shelves... I'm doing the sentiments first because it's harder to find them (although, with this new storage system, it's pretty fast-and-simple, anyway), and they will take MUCH longer than the images. The good news is that there are only eighteen cases of sentiments. I'm planning to do one case each night that I have available time until they're done...
And that's the update for tonight! If you have any questions, as always, feel free to ask! I'm gonna go watch the Giants/Forty-Niners game to see who pulls off a win. They're in overtime now... I'll be back a different day with crafty stuff. Thanks for stopping by and have a great night/week!
