Guest Author - Michelle McVaney
I love acrylic stamps and I seem to be addicted to buying them. The only problem is I have so many and couldn’t remember what I have. I tried several different methods of storing my acrylic stamps and the way that I have decided is most useful for me is storing them in Crop In Style Paper Sticker Binder. The plastic protectors in the paper sticker binder are made for many different types of stickers, but they work well for my acrylic stamps as well.
The key is to keep the plastic that the stamps come on. This keeps the stamps from sticking inside the protector pockets of the paper sticker binder. Some of the stamps that come on larger sheets of plastic I cut up to fit in the smallest paper sticker binder pouches. There are also pouches for larger stickers that I slide in my whole sheet of acrylic stamps. I have also found that using regular 12x12 three ring page protectors works well and you can sew down the middle to create two pockets if you want. I store my acrylic alphabets in 8 1/2x 11 page protectors and keep them in the front of my Paper Sticker Binder. Baseball card protectors also work well for smaller stamps. The nice thing about the Paper sticker binder refill protector pockets is that each pocket has a little flap that closes over the opening to keep the stamps from sliding out.
I tried sorting the stamps by categories but it got hard with all the stamps requiring different sizes of pockets. At first I was frustrated because I really like to organize according to category so that things are easy to find. I finally gave up on that with this storage method because some of the Christmas stamps are on a large sheet and some are individuals in a small pocket with other categories. I just kept things as close together as I could. I have found that having the stamps in these pockets is very easy to find even if they aren’t organized in categories. It is so nice to flip through the pages of stamps and find what all I have instead of trying to dig through a box.
I had tried in the past to store the stamps in a box, also in a binder with holes punched through the plastic stamp sheet. I found that I would sometimes lose stamps. Letter stamps were one of my main problems. It never fails that one would fall off and be missing in the bottom of my scrapbook bag or on the floor or who knows where.
With this new storage method the stamps are kept on the original plastic sheet backing that they come on, sometimes the backing is cut to help them fit in the pockets. However, if a stamp falls off of the plastic backing, it is inside of a pocket so it doesn’t get lost. The best thing about the Paper Sticker Binder storage method for my acrylic stamps is that it also has a zipper. So not only does the pocket protect the stamps when they fall off the sheet, but there is double protection. If the stamps fall out of the pockets then they are at least still zipped into the binder. Although I must admit that my stamps rarely fall out of the pockets.
The paper sticker binder also has pockets built into the front and back of the binder. I slide my stamp blocks into those pockets so they are right with my stamps! The Paper Sticker Binder is by far the best storage system I have found for my acrylic stamps!
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