The Dilemma of Unmounted Stamps

For years, I avoided unmounted stamps because I was scared of them. Not scared like a mouse just ran over my foot or like I heard a noise late at night when I'm alone, but scared like I didn't know how to deal with them. I didn't have a bunch of wood blocks to mount them and frankly, I didn't really like the look of homemade mounted stamps (I'm snobby about how stuff looks). Eventually some friends convinced me to get some and I used Tack It Over & Over on them and just used them to stick onto my blocks. That was OK, except, where do you store them? I stuck them to acetate and threw them in a box where I ignored them and rarely used them.

Then the clear stamps came out (OK, they were probably already out, but they became popular enough that I saw them) and I came up with a system of sticking them to acetate and throwing them in the drawers with my regular mounted stamps. While I was at it, I threw in the other unmounteds too. Then I proceeded to not really use them because they'd get buried in the bottom of the drawer.

Then one day at a stamp club meeting, my friend Toni showed us these DVD cases she had found and I was sold. I found a distributor who would sell to me and brought in a ton. That was several years ago and I'm still using the system. I love it. And my Brother Label Machine 1/4" labels fit perfectly along the spine of the DVD case. I titled them and organized them and they sat on a shelf above my work area.

Then I discovered Tim Holtz stamps and fell in love again. I put them in my DVD cases and soon my shelf was full. Originally, my Tim stamps were put in order with my other stamps and all mixed in. I found myself reaching for them most often though, since I'm often doing samples to show off stuff I sell and it's helpful when I can actually bring in the stamps in the samples. And it was like my Tim stamps got lost amongst the other stamps.

Finally, I had a brainwave and put all my Tim stamps together in order and my other stamps together. I wanted to be able to quickly differentiate my Tim stamps from my others, so I put little red dots on the cases. Sometimes, I'd get overwhelmed looking for a set I knew I had that I really liked. Then the lightbulb really went on and I labeled my favorite stamps with little blue dots. So now I have a great visual of my favorite and my Tim stamps amongst a great system of storing my unmounted stamps.

Here you can see how I've labeled them and you can see all the red and blue dots.

And here is a more wide angle shot of my whole shelf.