EYE IZ ... a rubber-holic!

I think I have frightened one of my customers by admitting that I own far too many rubber stamps.

I generally buy on sale, so when I started an inventory and listed prices (for insurance and replacement information) -- I even frightened myself. This was about three years ago, and I got about one quarter of the way through the stamps I owned at that time.

I was making this list so that my friend who sells Stampin' Up!(tm) stamps and I, who sell The Angel Company(tm) stamps, would be able to share our stamps and not end up with each of us owning the same sets. I had just received a flat priority mail envelope, overstuffed with unmounted rubber stamps I had ordered from a half-price sale at one of my favorite on-line stores. So, I added these to the list too.

I was using Quattro Pro (the Corel Office Suite's spreadsheet/database program). I asked it to total up the value of what I owned.

I almost had heart failure. I knew my husband would definitely have heart failure and then come back and "get" me if he saw that number. So, I saved a copy of the list with the msrp prices, deleted the entire column from the file and re-saved it under a new name. Then I continued to add stamps to the list.

I never finished the list, because every few months I am adding to it ...

Well, on Tuesdays, I get together with a couple friends and we stamp together. We're making cards we need right now (or yesterday, if we forgot to make them last week -- like for my sister's birthday), cards to have on hand for just-in-case situations, and to hopefully sell at a holiday boutique or craft sale this autumn. Plus we are planning some non-card stamped projects, like calendars for 2008 that use a CD case as the frame.

Yesterday, we ran out of time to actually accomplish anything and so at the last minute we decided to stamp up some images to use at home to get some cards made during the week. The one gal started looking through some of my stamp sets that are stored in CD cases -- in a box I got from IKEA that holds about 20 CD cases. She thought this was a lot of rubber stamps to own. (She's brand new to the hobby -- I thought two or three sets would be more than enough when I first started, too ...) Then I told her there were more stamp sets in the other room and her eyes grew very large.

Yeah, she was shocked.

OOPS -- I don't want to scare her away, you know. She has all the potential of becoming a very good customer of mine ...