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I organize mine my Landscapes, House Mouse, Flowers & Butterflies, Words, Holidays (because I have a lot of X-Mas), and Misc. I don't know if that will help you. I just looked at all my stamps to see what I had the most of and started my catagories from there.
I just finished indexing all my stamps and it was really hard to keep it to 10 categories. I'm not at home right now to look, but I think the categories were (not necessarily in this order) (1) Winter (sub categories: Christmas, ornaments, snowflakes, snowmen) (2) All other holidays, (3) Nature (sub categories: landscape, leaves, trees), (4) floral, (5) people and animals (6) design elements (such as tags, frames, etc), (7) backgrounds and borders; ( Sentiments (sub categories: sympathy, mixed, birthday, thank you, inspiration), (9) Life events (sub categories: birthday, wedding, baby, graduation, sympathy) (10) Misc. I will go back and make cross references for the sets that could be in more than one category, such as a set with images and sentiments. I'm also going to cross reference by several of the designers, such as Gina K and TAC. I have printed/stamped all my sets on individual pages and numbered them, so they are easy to find.
Because I'm a SU demo and my stamps have to fit in an armoire I divide them by current and retired first of all. My currents stamp are divided into these catagories: Background stamps, verbage, nature, holidays and other. This works for me! My other stack is the biggest.
__________________ Melissa Leach
This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118:24
I am planning on UM ALL my stamps. I have mostly SU! and Papertrey, but have a few other companies. So, my plan was to print new labels for all the stamps and use the color of the ink to indicate the brand (black=SU, blue=papertrey, pink=stampingbella, etc). As I have around 200 sets, I'm thinking more categories would work for me, I'm thinking 15-20. So far, I have:
Vintage
Sentiments
Nature
Occasions
Labels
Guys
Girls
Misc.
Sports
Winter
Fall
AlphaNumbers
Animals
Asian
Designs (like flourishes and such)
Fantasy
Flowers
Food
Then, I need another one, like Summer or Vacation or Travel or something like that, I'm sort of stumped after that.
Anyone else want to share?
__________________ ~*~ Clara ~*~ If you can think it, you can ink it!
I don't have a ton of stamps and tend to keep them separate by manufacture. So my PTI stamps in their cases are in an old CD holder, my bellas I leave in their baggie packaing and have them in a large index card file. The only ones I separate into categories myself are the Studio G stamps which I have as follows...
Birthday
Just a note/Thanks/Thinking of You
Congrats/Graduation
Baby
Kids
Wedding/Love
Flourishes
Flowers
Christmas
Fall (Halloween/Thanksgiving)
Spring (Easter/V's Day/St. Pats)
Summer (4th/BBQ/Beach/Vaca)
Alphas/Numbers
You get the drift... I have the white cube system from Michaels, and the one larger drawer set came with dividers that fit these perfectly, but I moved the divided to the smaller 3 drawer cube. I like it, its easy. Good luck!
I have a ton of stamps, but only 5 categories. Then what I did is photocopied the stickers or stamped the images on a blank piece of paper, and put it all in a binder, so I can flip through the binder, find the set and know where it's located. Because it may not be where I think it is.
Hi!
I am one of those rubber obsessed types and I do have a lot of stamps, like over 6,000. So over the years my categories have evolved so I can easily find what I need. My stamps are mostly unmounted now, but they're still grouped this way:
Drawer 1: Hearts, SU Ladies, People, Sewing, Girl Stuff
Drawer 2: Garden, School, Country, Floral, Solid Floral
Drawer 3: Made By (for the back of cards, etc), Birthday, Seasonal (sets that cover more than one season so they can't be separated), Frames
Drawer 4: Large Florals, Food, Tea, Kitchen, Containers, Houses
Drawer 5: Alphabet, Noah's Ark, Angels, Religious, Babies
Drawer 6: Backgrounds, Beach, Corners, Borders, Circus
Drawer 7: Bears, Frogs, Sea Life, Wildlife, Farm Life, Bugs, Birds, Cats, Dogs
Drawer 8: Asst. Holidays & Misc Sentiments, Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, 4th of July, Valentine, St. Patrick
Drawer 9: Cartoon, Fantasy, Guy Stuff, On Wheels (cars, trucks), Travel, Scenery, Leaves, Outdoors, Sports, Misc., Western. Words: Congrats, Best Wishes, Friend, For You, Thank You, Love, Get Well, Hello, Relatives, Thinking of You, Writing, Music.
Lots of categories, but in order to find stuff, I need to have clear labels.
I did similar categories to the ones above, and thought it was pretty good. But then got more and more sets (SU) that had mutlitple categories in the set. That really threw things off!! So I went to ALL the WORK to stamp the ones that didn't match the category onto cut pieces of cardstock (labeled with name of set and what category shelf where THAT set could be found). Then I placed the stamped pieces in a large square envelope that got placed on the shelf of the proper category to look through when needed "just the right stamps".
Worked for a bit but then got too many more like that and it just blew the whole system out of the water. I suppose I COULD go back and take days to stamp each and every stamp I have and categorize that in a notebook -- But that won't happen in this lifetime.
So now I just have a Word file that is an alphabetized list of all the set names I have plus I noted after each entry the shelf location of it, and a red R marked if it is retired (because that can't be used for entries into stamp camp card contest that has to be with current sets only). That list is printed out, stapled and clipped to the door of my stamp cabinet (one of those tall double door divided shelf Sauder storage cabinets that looks like a stand alone closet). When a new set is purchased, I write it in by hand at the proper place. I update the computer file every 3 months and reprint the list.
Top is a shelf that goes all the way across cabinet so that is my words, phrases, and alphabet sets; there are 4 shelfs on the left and 4 on the right...those get reserved for Wildlife, Spring and Summer Nature (flowers and butterflies, plus holidays that fit those seasons), Baby and Children, Birthday and Anniversary, Fall and Winter (plus holidays that fit those seasons except Christmas), Christmas, Backgrounds, with last shelf for the cases that hold the regular and jumbo wheels and wheel cartridges.
Not perfect solution, but doesn't drive me as crazy as the other way I was doing it.
But then, I always count in sets, if I counted in single stamps, I might have a 1,000 or 2,000. But, let's not tell Hubby that! He freaks out just at the number of sets! ;)
Quote:
Originally Posted by ladybugstamper2
Hi!
I am one of those rubber obsessed types and I do have a lot of stamps, like over 6,000.
__________________ ~*~ Clara ~*~ If you can think it, you can ink it!
I have thousands of stamps and use a subject catalog of looseleaf notebooks with pages in sleeve protectors and spread out over FIFTY categories. To make it manageable I use categories with sub-categories: Animals-Cats, Animals-Dogs, People-Men, People-Women, Special Events-Birthdays, Special Events-Christmas, and so forth. When I set up the categories I probably had 1/100th of the stamps I own now; I am soooo glad I didn
t set up my categories too broadly, such as just "Wildlife" or "Nature". The stamps themselves are not arranged by category but are easily located by the code number I stamped with the image in the catalog.
You might also look at how various stamp companies categorize their stamps. The fuzziest areas, in my mind, are design stamps and things like French script from a letter or a perfume label.
If you organize your stamps by category ...
Because it may not be where I think it is. 
