Unmounting lots of stamps. OH MY!

Hi Everyone,

Long time no see. I have been doing lots of things just not posting to my blog only once in a great while because I have been busy with getting organized. Just about a year ago I moved from our finished basement where I had a very large space to an upstairs spare bedroom. I have some pictures on the blog with that going on. I also went through a lot of my craft supplies and sold a ton of stuff that was just sitting around not being used and more than likely wouldn't be used so out they went. I still have a couple of boxes of stuff to sell. I may list it on the blog later. Most of what I have are wood mounted stamps and books. 

Well enough of that. I got around to taking some pictures of some of the stuff that I organized WARNING post is very picture heavy. This first post is what has taken me the longest to complete. My goal was to have it completed by September and I did it. Woo Hoo. So here it goes. The first set of pictures"before" from when I was in the basement. This pictures show the mounted stamps and how I was indexing my unmounteds. Yes I have a lot of stamps. I have been into stamping since 1994 so almost 20 years. You don't even what to know how much money I have in it cause I don't know but believe me I saw some of the price stickers on the stamps as I unmounted and cringed. 

BEFORE ( in old area)

I had 4 big custom stamp shelves over filled with stamps. Oh those shelves don't have any Christmas or Fall stamps on them. You will see what I did with those.

I still have the stamps in cd and dvd cases but I am no longer putting index cards of the images in there. Don't cringe I have a better solution. 

AFTER (in new room)

 Believe it or not this is about 98% of my stamps now. Amazing how much room mounted stamps take up. 

I am loving this. 

A little hard to see but each case is labeled with a category and a number.

Now this is all my Christmas and Fall stamps. Yes I know I have issues. LOL and I just bought another Christmas set yesterday. Oh boy. 12 step program here I come. LOL

Each case is number Christmas or Fall Box 1,2,3 etc. I would say some of these boxes have 30-50 stamps in them.

I don't own a lot of clear stamps but this is what I have and I purchased some of the Avery Elle pockets for stamps and dies. 

Of course they are all labeled

Now this hasn't changed this is my storage for my Studio G stamps. Baseball card pockets. LOVE IT. The stamps above are my wheel stamps I have umounted. I have an acrylic that fits them perfect but I did keep a couple of the empty wheels if for any reason I may need to put one back on it to use. 

Now I did have some wood mounted stamps that for different reasons I didn't unmount and I have them in a box but it's not very many. 

And now how to I find all the stamps?

Ok on to what I am guessing some are say well how do you know what you have? Yes, this took a lot of time but boy I am so very very please with it and have used it a good number of times already. I decided on what category's worked best for me. The I would stamp out that group on copy paper and put into page protectors (front and back) then the container (box,cd,dvd) would be labeled example Shy Bears DVD 1 and so on. Then on the sheet I would also label it the same so I just look in the catalog see what stamp I want to use then look at the label grab that case or box. I can tell the size or see the detail without have to pull out the case to look for the one I am looking for. So much time was wasted before doing that. 

These binders are I think 3 1/2 binders as you can see I needed two of them. But putting the sheets in the page protectors will really make this last a long time. 

To conclude. My hands were so tired of stamping and my nails were so ink stained it took weeks for me to get them back to normal. Would I want to do it all over again? Hell NO. Was it worth it? Oh very much so. 

I will have a couple more organizing posts in the coming days. I can say I have been stamping again and started making my holiday cards and loving it. 

Thanks so much for sticking with me. If you have any questions about what I did feel free to leave me a comment. Thanks for stopping by.