The Bounty!

As I have confessed to some of you (and maybe even here) my trip to the States resulted in the need to ship 18 boxes of stuff back to myself. Stuff that would not fit in my suitcase. Opening these boxes has been like a second Christmas.

Five of the boxes were filled with my haul from Aunt Ginny. I want to be able to tell this story correctly, and with reverence, but it is so exciting to me that I might just have to stick to the facts, ma'am. My Aunt Ginny had a friend who recently passed away. The mother of the deceased was in a quandary regarding what to do with many of my aunt's friend's things. My helpful and, dare I say, brilliant Aunt Ginny offered to take her friend's stamping and card-making supplies off her friend's mother's hands for a song. A song.

So, while we were visiting her in Virginia, my godmother casually said "So, I was wondering if you ever did any stamping or paper crafting..." Now, while there are some things I will never admit to my Women's Studies friends at a Harvard reunion, I can admit to you all here that my recent (as in over the last year) obsession with scrapbooking and cardmaking has taken over a good chunk of my life and my dining room.

My benevolent godmother and I went into her guest room and she pulled out from under the beds 16 shoe boxes of supplies. Long story short, we loaded them all into my parents' car, and here they are stacked up on the table in my parents' Carolina room at their house:



The first thing I did was to unload and sort all the stamps. Survey the view!







Next, I packed them back into the boxes, labelled of course. (OCD, anyone?)



Then, I laid out all the ink pads, and separated them into pigment-based inks and dye-based inks.




Not pictured are the other random supplies; pens, rubbing cards, blank cards and cardstock, doo-dads, ribbon, etc.

Once I clear my dining room table (here in Germany) of the paperwork I need to do (it's bill-paying time), then I will unpack the 5 boxes I sent to myself and re-re-organize the stamps. Only problem is... where to put them all? I'm thinking a small bookcase in the nook behind the door in my downstairs bathroom will have to suffice. "Hi, welcome to my home, and while you are peeing, please feel free to stamp up a card to send home to your loved ones..."