WOYWW #366

First things first, and a huge Welcome Home to Julia after her surgery,now back home and resting. I always think you start to feel so much better when you're back in your own space.Big hugs and lots of love to you Julia.

Another bunch of ATC's have landed on my desk over the last week, all arriving with lovely notes and cards too. Bit of editing in the top right- I forgot to take Andrea's ATC out of it's little case, I think I was so enthralled with the little pocket!

Talking of editing, I've been watching the BBC two programme Springwatch. Partly for the enjoyment of the subject matter, and partly for the pure pleasure of seeing my Beloved Eldest Sons name going up in the credits- he's one of the VTR editors. He's also doing some of the supervision work, which he's not done before, and on an outdoor broadcast programme like this, he said it's a bit like one of those circus plate spinning acts, trying to keep all the plates spinning, except these plates have very angry cats on them!




And onwards- the decking. Almost finished now, just one step to finish,a bit of cosmetic wrapping, then some handrails and screening to add.

The box under the top level is a new barbecue- on sale at B&Q. On the left, you can just see the legs of my airer for the washing. As there's only the two of us here now, we don't need a huge dryer, and being able to stand it on the decking is much easier than the route march to the bottom of the garden.
Indoors, and I'm finally almost at the end of my reorganising and cataloguing of stamps. I probably only have a handful now left on the cushion, they were stuck fast and can wait. Everything else has had the TOMBOW Mono Multi glue on the backs, and a little shifting around. One of those jobs that I've been meaning to do for a long time, and now I'm just on the last folder, the second of two Christmas stamps folders. I've also been scanning my index pages to print and store so I can see browse through all my stamps much easier. I can look through them folder by folder, or on my pc, but then you get distracted by something else!

To give you an idea of the size of this project, in the EXPEDIT storage here, the 4 folders in the top left cube, plus the 20 folders in the next row, all contain unmounted stamps- some polymer, some rubber. I have a few wood mounts still- either very large stamps, or some Stampscapes. And four separate boxes- 2 Visible Image, 1 Cardio, and one Gorjuss stamps.
 So, I'm done. Off now to link up with our hostess for a while, the amazing LLJ, and I'll be visiting later, as I have a Docs appointment this morning- got the dreaded sciatica back again. My physio thinks it's the result of how I'm distributing my weight, as I have so much numbness on the left, I'm throwing myself off to the right.

Organising stamps, again.

I think this organising stamps into a workable system is going to be a lifetime project. When I did all my unmounting, in the main I organised by theme. Apart from a few companies who's stamps I have a lot of, Lavinia, Crafty Individuals, Tim Holtz etc.
 The trouble with this is deciding what goes into what theme, and what if they cross over into another theme as well? Some stamps just seem to defy fitting into any category.


 And do I keep any word stamps with the images, or file them with words/definitions etc?
I bought a couple of new Chocolate Baroque stamps last week, the Serenity & Tranquillity sheets. I thought about putting them into the Oriental section, which does work, but then decided to make a new folder up and store all my Chocolate Baroque/Graphicus/Elusive Images sets together.




Note to self: Do not buy any more, the folder is full!
 
So I pulled all the images from the various folders they were in, except for the Christmas ones. They will stay with Christmas stamps. Which explains the stamp mountain on my desk.
 I sorted them back out into complete sets.
During the course of this, I realised I have lost a stamp, The Rose Stem Script. I can guess where it is- somewhere at the back of the Expedit unit! This is one reason I have been trying to unmount from the foam backing where possible. I have realised over the years that in a lot of cases, it seems like the foam has shrunk, giving a concave surface to the back of the stamp, which means they don't want to lie flat on the storage sheets, and sometimes drop off.
Of course, this now means I have to re-organise the Expedit while I try to find it.
 What I did do was to get images of all the stamp sets, and print them out onto A5 paper. In one or two cases, I had to stamp the images onto sheets and scan them in, as the stamp sets are now retired and I couldn't find images anywhere.
 It does mean I can print more than one copy, so I can file one with the CB stamps, and one within the theme(s) it fits, in A5 binders, which will be easier to flick through than the stamp binders. I'm hoping this will work better than previous systems.

Edit: Two hours later, stamp found- along with two others I hadn't missed yet! And the Expedit is clean & tidy again.

The post Christmas clean up

I always find myself doing this at this time of year. While I'm putting all the Christmas crafting stuff away, I get into tidy & organise mode. Last year I unmounted almost all my wood mount stamps- the only ones not done are some really large ones, and my Christmas stamps, as they were still packed in their box.So doing the Christmas stamps was something I intended for this year.

Here they all are, off their mounts, and labelled with post-its, so I can add the info to the catalogue pages. Not something I bothered with years ago, before blogging, but I do like to be able to include that info when I use a stamp, although, to be truthful, many of these stamps I've had for years, and most are probably discontinued now.
 This time I have not added cushion foam to them, leaving them as bare rubber. I've bought  a few packs of Tack n Peel, which I've applied to some acrylic blocks, and I'm going down that route now. Takes up even less storage space. As the Tack n Peel only goes on one side, and is completely clear, I can still use the opposite side of the block for foam mounted stamps.Now theres a thing- I had a look at a few with foam on, and wondered how difficult it would be to strip them all back to bare rubber. I discovered that a number of my older stamps actually separated from the foam cleanly with complete ease.

Stamp on the right, mounting foam on the left. No residue at all. I also found any dried on sticky residue can be removed with a pan scourer- saves on the fingerprints, lol.
 Not all of the foam would come off easily, some was still well adhered, so I'm leaving those. Clearly, over the years the adhesive loses its stick, and I can live with unmounting from the foam as a gradual process.


So after this it was time for a bit of a clean up. Especially since Beloved Hubby has been renovating my old craft room for him to do all his computer repairs in, there is enough dust about to carve your name in, even with closed doors.Removed everything from my desk and gave it a good clean. Thats the last time it'll be that clean and tidy!

                                      Told you it wouldn't be long.

Anyway, while I was tidying, I set up my Silhouette for a couple of projects I had in mind. A few weeks ago, I saw some stencils in use that looked really useful- one was letters & numbers, another was circles.I considered browsing the net to see where they were on sale, when I saw my Silhouette out of the corner of my eye, and thought ' don't be daft, cut your own'. So I spent an hour or so making them up, and I stored the files till I got round to them. Today seemed the perfect opportunity.

 First one, the letters & numbers.With some patches of circles to break it up & fill up the spaces. Bonus is I also have all the letters & numbers it cut out to make little masks.

 Next one was some circles- just made this a half page size- I got bored making circles, lol.

 Final one I cut was some stencil font numbers.

Unmounting Done!

Well, almost all done, to be truthful. It's taken almost the whole week, and apart from a few very large stamps which  I am leaving on their blocks, I'm done. I admit, I haven't done the Christmas stamps either, but they're packed away in a box, so out of sight, out of mind.

All in ring binders, sorted into categories, or manufacturer- Paper Artsy, Lavinia, Crafty Individuals, Tim Holtz,as there are a quite a few of theirs. I split up sets if they had words/sentiments etc, and there are folders for words/sentiment,and Quotes/definitions. I didn't buy all black folders by the way, I had loads in all sorts of colours (whatever was on offer somewhere!), I bought a couple of rolls of black Fablon from Wilkinsons (cheapest place I could find it), and covered the spines of all the folders.

All stamped onto a sheet, which I am going to scan in sometime in the future. For two reasons, one so I can re-print the sheets A5 size, and put in A5 folders so I can just flick through the pages, rather than get each folder out, and secondly, because what we have done is take photographs of each room/ hubbys power tools/computers etc, so we can see (and prove) what we have should we ever be in the unfortunate position of needing to make an insurance claim. I realised. looking at the binders, I could never actually prove what was in them like this, and can you imagine the difficulty I'd have trying to claim?

Where I know who made the stamp, I've recorded that with the image. I like to try & put that info in my posts, if I can. I know how often I've seen a stamped image, and wondered about the stamp- who made it/ where I can get it.
 A few people asked how I was doing this on last weeks WOYWW, so here's what I found in the process.

  Some stamps came away from the woodblock intact with rubber foam- Penny Black were good for this, and Stampendous. I like my stamps with the foam cushion, and all my u/m's are on it, so this saved me quite a bit of remounting. The foam clings well to the acrylic blocks too. Here is a Penny Black, fresh off the wood block, and on an acrylic block.

With Hero Arts, Stamps Happen and Judikins I found the rubber peeled away from the foam cleanly, so these I could re-mount on Kling-on.


 I had some stamps with no manufacturer name on the blocks, that were backed with a not very good quality foam, and these sort of peeled off ok, but did leave a bit of a residue on the stamp. But, as it wasn't too bad, and I was putting it onto Kling-on, I tried one to see whether or not it would affect the stamp. It stuck ok, and the image came out clean, so it seems a little isn't a problem, but obviously only if you are putting them onto foam. If you were going to use bare rubber, you'd have to get it all off.

The ones that seemed like I might get the whole thing off in one go, but was a bit too well stuck to the block, I microwaved. Depending on the size of the stamp, they took 8 -15 seconds to loosen the glue enough to peel the stamp off. I used the microwave on med high, and its an 800 watt oven. Mine has a dial, rather than digital, so you can't set it for seconds. I just put it on for a couple of minutes and watched the main oven clock to count the seconds.I started with 8, if it was still stuck I tried another 4 and so on. I think my microwave has had more use this week doing stamps than it had all last year, lol.

This rack used to be pretty much filled with my wood mounted stamps, lay on end like the large ones still on the top. This is the rubble sack full of the discarded wood mounts! So a definite space saver.


 Oh, and one final amusing bit. I was in WHSmiths the other day, and saw the Creativity magazine, with a set of free stamps on the front. What attracted me was the Globe stamp-always looking for good 'male' images. Didn't notice at the time(!), but what is on it? Yes, another blasted Thank You stamp!