I have a bin full of rubber stamps in my craft room. And sadly, some of them haven’t even been used. I bought them because they were so darn cute but had no idea what I was going to do with them. I know, not a smart shopper. But our friend, Melissa, may have just found the answer to my jumbled up bin of stamps and lack of inspiration.
She came to visit me the other day with a gigantic binder
tucked underneath her arm. I thought it must be her research for her doctoral dissertation but it turned out to be something much better! She had photographed her stamp collection (which is larger than the aisle you see at Michael’s) and printed out all of her stamps onto regular paper. She then placed these sheets into the binder, organized by theme (Christmas, Halloween, beach, sayings, etc.). Then, behind each sheet of stamps she had printed ideas for using them! Most of her inspirational sheets came from www.patstamps.com but you can just google and find great inspirational ideas everywhere for your specific stamps. I can’t wait to do this with my rubber stamp collection. My binder won’t be nearly as big as Melissa’s, but it will still be full of ideas!
5 comments so far:
I’ve since decided that it would be helpful to number my stamps and the pages to coordinate. That way, I won’t just have to say that I have that set somewhere in my closet, but that it’s Number 65 and it’s on shelf three. At this point it’s an unrealized fantasy, but maybe someday.
I love my rubber stamps. I think it would be so neat to take a piece of foam-core board, stamp a few dozen or mroe of my favorite images in random ways, color them, and frame it as wallart for my craft room.
Recently, I saw a craft room where the lady had put up pretty white shelves and used the stamps themselves as art…however, I’d have to add a room onto my house to be able to put up enough shelves to hold mine. And honestly, that’s just expensive!
I placed all of my acrylic stamps inside standard CD jewel cases. I then glue and identify the stamp on a 5″ X 5″ card stock file. It works great. I bound the file with a binder ring. When I go shopping I have this to take along so I don’t duplicate.
Julia, that is a super clever idea!
I store my wood block stamps in long flat acrylic boxes. In order to keep track of where they are, I number the boxes. I keep an inventory of what’s in each box by stamping one sheet of paper with all images in the box, place it with coordinating box number (IN A SHEET PROTECTOR) in a binder. I LOVE THE IDEA OF KEEPING PROJECT INSPIRATION BEHIND THE IMAGES! THANKS!) Additionally, I have an ongoing table of contents in the front of the binder with the number and title of the stamp sets and or theme of the stamps in said box. In the case of fonts, I stamp a few upper and lower, all punctuation and ding bats. The key to success is to update your inventory as soon as you add stamps to the collection….. and finding those boxes. Of course, I bought mine at Wally world and Wally must hate me because they discontinued them. The boxes were intended for bead tubes or those sets of tictac type containers used for seed beads. I have numbered the plastic containers they come in since I’ve run out of the bead boxes. Also, flat foam stamps fit in 8.5 x 11″ document containers.
Cricket, you’re so organized! I love it! Thanks for all the great tips.