How I Organise- Stamps

STAMP COLLECTION

My stamp storage might look a bit crazy as it's stored in rather a mishmash of storage but it suits me, the space I have, and I know where everything is. At least by reading this you can get different ideas of how to store your stamps!!

 

ACRYLIC SHELVING

If you view my craft room tour, you'll see I'm lucky enough to have a little stamp room which stores my fab acrylic shelving. This is the view through the doorway.

My most used/favourite stamps are stored on my fab acrylic shelving. Here are my Stamping Bella Uptownies-sigh- they make me very happy! I keep all these in their original packaging.

I also have LOTV on the left and MFT on the right (and a few Gorjuss just cos they look pretty on the shelves!)

And Tiny Townies and some other Stamping Bella collections on the left as you enter the room.

ACRYLIC STAMPS, CHRISTMAS STAMPS AND SENTIMENTS

A second place I store stamps in is these fridge binz on my main Ikea shelf unit in my main craft room.

I use these pockets and inserts and label and separate them using these. I currently have 3 binz for stamps: the first one stores my sentiment stamps. These are divided by manufacturer and then right at the back I have a section for alphabets. For stamp sets which have accompanying dies, see my die-cutting organisation page.

In a second one I store all my Christmas stamps separated by manufacturer and at the back I have a section for purely Christmas sentiments.

The third one stores all my other acrylic stamps. Because I have quite a large collection of PTI stamps, I further separated these into sub-categories: Floral/Garden, Home, Kids, Male, Patterns. I used these to make dividers and cut them to size as I do for my paper storage.

The majority of stamps stored in these binz are acrylic but there are a number of rubber but these are either sentiments or Christmas stamps because here is the only place I store them.

 

RUBBER STAMPS

A third place I store stamps is in these DVD cases on this shelf in my stamp room. The vast majority of the stamps stored here are rubber. I currently have Elzybells, other Stamping Bella, SU, Riley, Mo Manning, Purple Onion and Whipper Snapper stored here.

I transferred any stamps that needed to be made into cling and then simply stuck the stamps in the case. I then label the spine with the manufacture and the front with the name 

of the stamps stored.

WOOD-MOUNTED STAMPS

In the bottom 2 drawers of my Ikea Alex Drawer Unit I store my wood mounted stamps and ones I don't use very much (a lot of freebies from magazines! etc)

PROJECT LIFE STAMPS

As I'm starting to buy a few stamps for Project Life, I'm finding there is a crossover with some stamps from my main collection so I'm thinking of doing a Project Life inventory (computerised) to pull together all the relevant stamps. I store them in these, here in my black Ikea Raskog cart. 

DIGI STAMPS

As you'll see on my Favourite Storage page, these binders and page protectors are one of my favourite storage items and just one thing I use them for is organising my digi stamps.

First of all I created a digital template 3 columns x 4 rows with boxes roughly 2"x2". I then created a separate file for each stamp company and rescaled each image to fit in the 2"x2" boxes. I then printed them out, cut them up and put them in my page protectors. As you can see I have divided my stamps by stamp company and labelled each one using my Dymo Labeller and sticky tabs.

Et voila! It's now very easy to view and keep track of my digi collection.

SENTIMENTS LOG

One thing I did quite early on when I started crafting was to keep a log of all my sentiments. I didn't limit this to purely sentiment sets but any stamps which happened to include a sentiment. It was/is a very crude system and I wish I'd taken a bit more time over it. I probably wouldn't change the actual method as it does its' job well but I just wish it was a lot neater (think functional rather than pretty!) But I don't have the time to start from scratch so that's that!

I store my log in this file and I've divided it up into these categories:

Animals, Baby, Best Wishes, Birthday, Celebrate/Congrats, Crafty,Female, Food and Drink, Friendship, Get Well/Relax/Sorry, Good Luck, Happiness, Home, Inspiring, Love, MaleMiss You, Nature & Gardening, A Note/Hello, Stars, Teacher, Thank You, Thinking of You,You're Special.

The aim of this log is so that at any time I can easily look and see what "good luck" sentiments I have or what "new baby" sentiments so that I can find the most appropriate one for my card. I love to mix and match my stamps so this very much helps with that.

In marker pen, I simply wrote the sentiment category at the top of some scrap paper and then stamped all my sentiments that related to that category. Underneath each sentiment I quickly write who the stamp manufacturer is and what the stamp/stamp set is called. Then each page gets filed in page protectors and filed in the appropriate labelled tabs.

So far I have only done this for non-Christmas sentiments but as my collection has grown I think it's now time to add a Christmas section. So watch this space!