Success from Determination (or The Crazed Rantings of an Obsessed Scrapbooker!)

Sometime in January, I became unhappy with my stamp organization, or lack thereof. I had a jam-packed Tim Holtz stamp binder and a plastic bin for all of the overflow. But the bin was starting to overflow too. That is when I became determined (read: obsessed) with finding a better organization method for my stamps.

I liked my Tim Holtz binder well enough, but it was too small for some of my stamp sheets and a little on the pricey side. I lurked on forums, waded through youtube videos, blog posts and scrappy websites galore looking for the answer. In the end, I decided to go with a bigger, homemade version of what I already had. That's when the real headache began.

It was easy enough to get pages for the small little stamps and the full letter-sized stamp sheets. The real problem was the more typically sized sheets of stamps that measure somewhere around 5x8 inches. Many people who posted their binder system online had bought 2-up DVD sleeves with a covering flap at Staples, which I could find neither online or in store. Then, I found the above photo pages online at Black's Photography, with the sleeves measuring 6x8. Perfect! I found them in store after a couple of tries. Perfect! I brought them home, filled them with stamps and put them in my new binder. Not perfect!

You see, at 2-up and 6 inches high each, these pages measure a little better than 12 inches. Standard binders are only 11 inches tall, leaving a little better than 1 inch sticking out of the binder. Too bad my math skills are only that good after the fact, huh? Another problem, the side opening had the stamp sheets falling out whenever I turned a page or moved the binder, as you can see below.

To add insult to injury, mere days after I bought all of this stuff, I get a Staples ad welcoming Martha Stuart organizational products to their Canadian stores. Of particular interest, their binder series, which looked to be perfect for my needs. Needless to say, I had a few choice words for Martha and her poor timing!

So, what to do? I'd bought these not-so-perfect page protectors that were frustrating me and I was angry with Martha Stuart for flaunting her perfect system at the most annoying, inopportune time. I had to make this work and I had to do it without the help of Martha. Apparently, irrational snubs combined with stubborn independence is how I roll!

I decided I'd buy some adhesive-backed velcro to secure the openings, which may or may not have worked, as the stamp sheets barely fit the width of the protectors (so where to put the velcro?) and then buy either a legal sized binder, a three ring scrapbook album or photo album so my pages would fit properly. My simple, inexpensive storage solution was becoming more and more expensive and complicated. In the meantime, my stamp binder had to lay flat on my shelf and I needed to use an exorbitant amount of care flipping through it to keep all my stamps in place.

Flash forward to today, when I decided it was time to buy some more ink for the printer. Off to Staples I went, intending to also price their legal sized binders. As I walked in the store, there it was; a poster of Martha Stuart smiling sweetly at me, inviting me to check out her wonderful array of products in aisle 6. So I did. I am so glad that I did!

Below are shots of my new, working-just-fine stamp binder. The first shot is my ity-bity stamps, stored in baseball card protector sheets:

Next is an example of the stamps that needed a standard letter-sized sheet protector:

And finally, my truly perfect Martha Stuart 2-up pages complete with protective flap openings that fit just right in my binder:

I am so happy to have this project done! Caving in to the Martha products helped me get there a whole lot cheaper and easier than my makeshift options would have. Plus, the results are far more satisfactory than my fist option would have been!

I am, however, still unimpressed with little Ms. Perfect and her not-so-perfect timing! Hmph!