Sunday, October 4, 2009

Storage for Rubber Stamps

I have two boxes of mounted rubber stamps. Above is a sample. I thought I would be able to find what I wanted if I efficiently labeled each one. Except I could never fit them back in the box where they were supposed to go so they ended up piled one atop another. Then I would have to dig to find what I wanted and I hate that. Today, I discovered I may be the last person on this great green earth to have discovered CD holders to store unmounted rubber stamps. Since I use my stamps for polymer clay, I felt I no longer needed them to be mounted. I either run the stamp and clay through the pasta machine together or I lay the clay on the stamp and give it a roll. I've always hated those wooden blocks. So scraper in hand, I removed all the backings from my mounted stamps. Below are the first three piles of filled CD holders. They are organized according to theme, shapes or textures.
The larger tool took care of the large wooden blocks and the small putty knife worked for the rest. Some of my stamps were so old, the backing just fell away easily. Others needed a little persuading.
Below sample is the stamps stored in the "Foliage" CD holder.
Labeling is easy with the handy dandy label maker.
So what began as two large boxes of stamps, ended in one small container in which I could also store the ink pads.
I am so tickled with this little system. I googled "storage for rubber stamps" and tons of great ideas came up, including a video on the CD system. I am not going to index, at least not yet. It is small enough that I can flip through these in a blink.
I did keep one block and one dense sponge to help apply even pressure when I need to. But other than that, I have a huge garbage bag of wooden blocks and sponges for the garbage men in the morning and a whole half of a studio cabinet shelf to fill with more goodies. Shopping just popped in my head and I mentally slapped myself back into reality.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Neat idea Marlene! Though I don't think I have as many stamps as you.

Lupe Meter