Ever since I finished my mail art project, which I failed to write about, but still may, and the first round of my pocket letter project, which I also failed to write about, but still may, I've renewed my focus on craft room organization and unmounting my woodblock stamps. I mean, it's really a space problem in the end. I have my woodblock stamps stored in
Moppe storage boxes from Ikea (from back when they were solid and sturdy), and they just take up a lot of space. Based on rough calculations, one Moppe box fits about 60 woodblock stamps; one bin of cling-mounted rubber stamps on storage sheets holds about 300 stamps! So I'm, in theory, working on emptying one Moppe box at a time and doing the sticky work of removing the woodblocks and original foam cushion, cleaning off the bare rubber stamp, and remounting them on cling foam so I can use the stamps with acrylic blocks or any stamp positioning tool. The bins of cling-mounted stamps will live in the space currently occupied by the Moppe boxes.
The thing is, I'm not disciplined enough to work on one box at a time. Instead, I open up lots of drawers and pick out woodblock stamps I especially like or want to use at that moment, and unmount from there. So out of my 60+ drawers of woodblock stamps, there are some missing from almost every drawer, and maybe two completely empty drawers in total. I'm having a pointless conflict between efficiency and spontaneity in which there are no winners, and the outcome doesn't really matter. Yet, I forge ahead...
I decided on a different approach the other day - unmount all stamps of one theme. I chose to focus on my tea-related stamps because I wanted to use them for a project, and many of them are clustered in a few drawers. I didn't do quite all of them, but a little over 30 of them on Sunday morning, and afterward, quickly created this card:
The Love and Scandal stamp is from
Stampington, which no longer carries it, and the teacup is from
Stamp Francisco, a grand old stamp company who blessedly still exists and carries so many wonderful images. And I still want them all.
Maybe by the end of the summer I will have actually emptied one whole stamp box! If I do, I'll share photo evidence in this space...
