A confession

I have to confess - I've always loved stamps. As a child I collected them and spent hours going through my dad's albums. As an adult I still collected the first day covers until I realsied that there was no point to this exercise other than the fact that I loved them as miniature works of art. Whenever I can get access to them for next to nothing I do so. When I was in Oxford a couple of months back I was thrilled to see packets of assoerted stamps still attached to the original paper in a charity shop in Oxford. This was great - I could buy the stamps and not feel I was wasting my money as it was going to a good cause.



These packs were great and I particularly liked this miniature sheet of lighthouses (another of my obsessions)



I can spend ages sorting my stamps depending on what I'm going to do with them. Last year I saved hundreds of royalty themed stamps for my sister who is mad about the queen. I sorted them, soaked them, arranged them and stuck them all onto an old rectangular tray, covered it in in decoupage medium and gave it to her. I couldn't believe how thrilled she was!



So a couple of nights ago I found myself sifting and sorting stamps again. This time I was looking for Christmas stamps (above) and definitives (below). I haven't worked out what I'm going to do with the definitives yet - any ideas please let me know.



Once sorted I soak them off in a bowl of water overnight and by the next morning they are ready to be peeled off their backing and laid out to dry while I'm at work. Gosh my life is thrilling.



I try to concentrate on a few stamp designs at once so that I have a selection to play with. With the Christmas ones I decided to try out some card designs for this year. The card on the right is one I made last year and begged it back for the purposes of this post but it was well received so I decided to do some more. Still playing with ideas at the moment...



One of my earlier projects was to use all the lovely monotone stamps from the early part of the last century to cover a disney wastepaper bin thrifted for 10P. My original idea came after reading one of Kaffe Fassetts books where he had covered a lampshade with stamps. That man has a lot to answer for and I for one am thrilled at the impact he's had on my life over the last 30 years with his knitting, patchwork, books painting and general inspiration. If it hadn't been for him there might have been far less colour in our lives! I digress. I love the shades on this and the only thing stopping me making another is that I need more stamps!



I'm saddened that we use so few stamps these days and always like to pick up new designs when they come out hoping that by using those on my letters I can make somebody else's day in the way that unusual stamps on a leter makes mine!



Anyway if you like playing with stamps/maps and other bits of paper check out the work of "BOMBUS" on etsy. I think he/she is as obsessed as I am!

Hope you're having a good week!

Love Wend