Confessions of a Stamp Hoarder

I fear that I have too many stamps.  The problem is that I love almost all of them and have trouble figuring out which ones I could give away. It started innocently enough.  I bought a few wood mounted stamps (the first one I bought was a swirly heart).  Then I joined Club Scrap, where I received two stamps a month and I bought others as well.  After a while, I bought these plastic chest of drawers and filled them up:

Each chest has six drawers and most are filled with a double layer of wood mounted stamps, arranged by subject. That wouldn't be so bad, but my wood mounted stamps won't all fit in there.  I've started to create bins arranged by subject, which I store on the top shelf of my clothes closet:

The two small plastic bins on the left have birthday stamps in one and Easter/4 Season sets in the other.  The large rectangular orangish box is full of halloween stamps. The larger circular box in the corner is full of "people" stamps. The two plastic bins on the right have "kids/sports" in one and "birds, fish and seashore" in the other. The small wood box has "mail art" stamps, and  the rectangular box with the rose print houses my Christmas stamps.  The brown leather-like binder and the plastic file have acrylic stamps and cling mounted rubber. Here's what these look like up close:

Because, yes, at some point, I started buying unmounted stamps.  These two containers wouldn't be too bad, but I have more:

I have five binders full of unmounted stamps! I store these in a cupboard in my bathroom. And, finally, for good measure, I have some wood mounted sentiment stamps:

I have three decent sized rectangular containers with stamps in a single layer.

So, there you have it. A full confession and accounting of my stamp collection (foam stamps not included; yes, I have those, too. Sigh). I didn't count my stamps, but, if I had to guess, I would think there's about 1500 wood mounted stamps (based on the fact that there's about 40 in each sentiment container and each row in the plastic drawers) and an equal number of unmounteds (based on about 20 stamps per page in a binder, ten pages per binder, five binders; plus the two storage continers in the closet).  Am I insane? Is this worse than my paper hoarding, described here? How many stamps do you think you have? And do you remember the very first stamp you purchased?

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Check back tomorrow for a few stamp give-aways!

Confessions of a Paper Hoarder

I have paper - lots of paper. So, I signed up for Shimelle's new class, "Pretty Paper Party," in the hopes that it would get me back in into the scrapping groove. And it has, which is a good thing, because in addition to lots of paper, I have lots of pictures to scrap. The layout above was inspired by one of her posts about using a pop of color with neutrals.

And this layout responds to a prompt about scrapping on a background of patterned paper. I believe that all the papers in this layout have a pattern (although I flipped one over for the yellow journaling block on the right hand side). Both of today's layouts feature pictures from our family vacation to the Pacific Northwest because I decided to work on finishing these up during the beginning of the class.  You can always click on a picture of a layout to see more details.
So, now it's confession time.  If you took all your paper and stacked it up, how tall would your stack be? All your paper - patterned, cardstock, 8.5x11, 12x12 - everything.  I stand 5'5", and I think my stack would be just a smidge shorter than me! Is that awful? Or is that wonderful? How tall is your stack?