My Stamp Storage

 Someone over on 2Peas asked how people store their clear stamps. Well, I didn't have this issue until the beginning of this year. Copics changed my life in all sorts of ways! Including costing Mike heaps and heaps of money in stamps, hehehehe. Anyway, the point of this post is to show pictures. This picture is of what I did yesterday. I used to have stamp carousels, which were fine when I didn't have that many stamps. But then I discovered Simply B Stamps and more recently The Greeting Farm stamps and I just plain outgrew the carousel. I got another one, but then the stamps in the first were constantly getting dissed. 

All my stamp sets now live in Tim Holtz stamp envelopes. Individual image stamps have been taken out of their packages and combined if they're part of a set. Sets like Papertrey Ink that have a theme are in one envelope together. Stamps from the same company with a similar theme are together (ie Halloween stamps by Stampendous). This was really necessary as I don't have a ton of space and all that packaging can drive you nuts! If you haven't clicked on the "My Scrap Room Tour" page at the top of the blog, I scrap in a closet in our bedroom. All my stuff needs to be contained within that small area, lest it take over the entire house.

 I got this idea from someone on the Papertrey Ink message board. There are these stamp folders by Tim Holtz and they're pretty inexpensive when considering how costly everything Tim Holtz is. The problem with Papertrey Ink stamps is that they come in stupid CD cases. Guess what CD cases do; they BREAK! They break a lot. I've only had mine for a few months, six at most, and they're all broken. I decided to take this gal's lead and move all my Papertrey Ink stamps over into these little folders instead.

 What you do is take a piece of acetate (easily bought from any office supply store - overhead projector sheets work too), stick your stamps to it, and then peel the image sticker up and stick it on to your acetate. Papertrey Ink includes their sticker separately in their stamp packages. All you have to do is cut up the sticker, place it on your acetate the way that you want your stamps organized, and stick the stamp on the opposite side. The PTI sticker comes with a line label as well, so that goes on the label part of the Tim Holtz envelope. With these here Simply B Stamps what I did was take the stamp out of the individual package, peel the image sticker off the acetate already included, and then stick the sticker on to my larger piece of acetate. I made sure to keep the line together, the six images all have their names written beside them and on the label part of the Tim Holtz envelope I have written the name of the stamp line.

 The beauty part of this system is that it can fit in my Tim Holtz binder for travel. In the first picture you saw that I am keeping these envelopes in the little cube I have above my desk in my closet. But when I need to go somewhere I can pop whatever stamps I'd like to use into this binder and go! The stamps still in their original packaging can travel in here too, it's zippered. 

I hope you enjoyed my little tour of my stamping set up!