Aug 12 2010
Rubber Stamp Organization
I’m sure a lot of you are like me no matter what your favorite crafts is. If it has anything to do with paper than you probably have a huge selection of stamps. I love stamps. There, I said it. I really love stamps on “Clearance“. lol I’m not sure if the whole idea of not being able to get it again. I realize clearance doesn’t mean its discontinued but it implies it to me. I’m a sucker for marketing. Even when I know they are trying to stear me in a certain direction. I’m a happy sheep and I just bleat my way where they want me to go.
I started out with wood mounted stamps and still buy them for the $1 buys in giant boxes you dive into. (Makes my heart flutter…What will I find!?!) Recently, I only get a wood mounted stamp if it’s something I know I’ll use over and over. Later, I fell in love with the unmounted rubber sheets put out by ClubScrap.com All those coordinated themes for the price is just unbeatable. Next came the allure of the clear unmounted systems and I realize a lot of people feel they don’t have the quality of the rubber but the value is too good. I honestly haven’t had a image quality issue. So my point? I have tons of stamps…. Let’s not forget the old foam ones too! lol
I’ve been sleuthing the net day and night now for a way to organize my stamps and I’ve seen so many great ideas. I loved the idea of CD boxes for acrylics. I’ve had the unmounted in 8 1/2 x 11 notebooks in page protectors on transparency sheets. I’ve also tried the little notebook with an alphabetical listing and imprint of all my stamps. I never could find time to keep up with that. The biggest issue I’ve had with all of the systems to organize stamps is that they only organize one style of stamps. I’ve decided to go back to drawers. I have been wanting to get away from drawers because I can’t see all my stamps and I’m scared I wont use them. I’d love to have a craft room full of little shallow shelves to decorate the walls with the stamps but 1) I don’t have the space as I’m working in my kitchen and 2) That’s still only good for wood mounted stamps. What to do?
Contents of Flower Stamp drawer
I decided to take all the 12 x12 drawers that hold my shelves up on my desk and change them from holding my papers to holding all of the stamps. How is this different? I’m categorizing them all now and putting every type of stamp in one place. Once I made that decision, I got excited and started to look for category suggestions. I tried looking at online stamp stores, other crafters blogs, etc. No one seemed to have categories that would work for me. I saw them organized by manufacturer and styles. That didn’t fit my needs. By putting them into drawers by topic I can say I need “this” and go to see all of the styles of stamps I have on that subject. For example, I have flowers in wood mounted & unmounted rubber, as well as acrylic and foam! They are now all in one place. I can even remove my drawer and put it down on the desk top while I work.
I spread out all of my stamps on my kitchen table. Yes, it’s big and yes, they ended up in piles… (I should have taken a picture I’m sorry it was quite a sight. However, I was running back and forth watching the So You Think You Can Dance finale and didn’t think of snapping a picture of the process. Guess if I’m going to blog these things I need to think ahead of time. lol ) I moved the piles around to see how many I had of what subjects and then combined smaller piles to others of a similar nature. I knew I had 12 drawers to work with so I was looking for 12 categories. For instance, I had a ton of flower stamps, a good number of leaves and insects. So flowers got a drawer all on its own and the leaves, butterflies, bees, etc. all went into a second drawer I named “Nature”. I also put these on the top left two drawers because I knew I would use them a lot. Since these sit on my desk and I tend to put things down in front of them, making it hard to open lower drawers, I decided to put the stamps I use most in the upper drawers. The seasonal items and things I only use once in a while went into the bottom drawers.
Since I had such a rough time finding categories I wanted to share them with you in case you run into the same problem. No sense re-inventing the wheel, right? Below are the stamp categories and their arrangement that I came up with.
My left side top to bottom:
FLOWERS
NATURE: leaves, trees, insects etc.
SENTIMENTS: primarily words used for card making
PHRASES: words and phrases used for cards AND scrapbooking
SHAPES: geometric, suns, moons, hearts, & stars
PLAYFUL: Girlie.Girlfriends, Boys, Pets more cartoonish styles
My right side top to bottom:
BACKGROUNDS, TAGS & FRAMES
DECORATIVE: primarily used as embellishments scalloped circles etc.
ALPHABETS: letter & Numbers
THEMES: Sets w/ unique themes, Architecture, Old west
HOLIDAYS: 4th of July etc.
RELIGIOUS: Christmas, Easter, Hanukkah, & Sacraments
Sentiments Drawer Catagory used for Card Making
I will add here that I loved the idea from the organizing tips from Noell Hyman at Paperclipping.com that I have a separate case for all of my journaling items. So I have several stamps there that are lined shapes to create journaling mats. I’m keeping them together with my lined stencils and kits already created for writing out my stories all in one portable case.
I hope this helps you and if you didn’t get anything out of it more than a laugh, I’m happy with that too! Feel free to comment and I hope to see you around the net.
HUGS, Claudia aka PomMommy
