Are you one of my fellow lovers of craft and/or office supplies? I love pens, paper, pencils, folders, and such. I also love craft supplies, especially sewing and scrapbooking. I love to go into scrapbook stores and look at 1,000 kinds of papers and plan out how I will scrap a certain event and set of photos. I used to spend a lot of time scrapbooking. I'd plan big sessions for my school breaks and knock out a year at a time, hunched over my desk until the middle of my back went numb. My books from that time weigh about 7 pounds.
Here is the point where I am confronted by my Ideal Self and my Authentic Self. My Ideal Self is a scrapper. The kind that creates pages that could be published in magazine. The kind that regularly attends and photographs events that you'd scrap. The kind that does this regularly. But this isn't the real me, y'all. Not anymore. I don't make "real" scrap books anymore. I order them from Shutterfly and they are less than 1/2" thick.
Right now I am having a kind of "reverse nesting," where I want to purge and sort and organize. I want to contain and label. I want empty shelves so that I have a space to fill with baby clothes, books, dishes, etc. I want less and less stuff to keep track of. Today I ventured into what we call the "back bedroom," which is a room that is totally empty except for a video game chair. This won't be the baby's room, but it is where I store empty suitcases and a very small amount of craft supplies.
In the closet, I found this box of stamps. I am not a stamper, friends. I think my Ideal Self is a stamper, but the honest truth is that I don't make my own cards and I dont' want to make them. I don't want to own the supplies, I don't want to go through the process, and I absolutely do not want to store the finished product until I have a reason to send a card. I am also not really a card sender. I went through the box very, very quickly and found about $100 worth of stamps. Most of them I've had for about 10 years and most of them have never been used. I kept the one stamp I like to use when I send out Christmas Cards (I order those from Vistaprint, I don't make them). The rest are now in my very full donate box.
I bought about 99% of my stamps during a time in my life when I didn't know myself very well and did an awful lot of impression management. I really, honestly wanted to be the person that made and send handmade cards! I really did! My Ideal Self is that classy of a lady, y'all. But I still have cards that I made in August of 2007. I don't have a craft in mind that invovles stamps and I am honestly not interested in finding one. So I am getting rid of them. And now I have a nice empty ziploc containter that I can fill with baby socks.
If anyone out there is a REAL stamper and wants a few more, let me know. I'll have the box around for another 4 or 5 days.
