Whatcha Been Stamping?

So on and off for past two days I've been soaking all those stamps.Today was also a major effort to de-flea both cats.Step one was a wet combing with blue Dawn dish soap,step two a good dusting of DE and step three a application of Sentry flea drops.Borax and De applied to furniture and rubbed in.Tomorrow I'll vacuum all the furniture.I now have a thousand or so stamps to sort and organize.The foreign stamps will be a give away so watch for that.Some rather nice ones that came off pretty easily.

I too have noticed a slight decline in listings for the past couple weeks.I have resorted to BIN items more often.Many sellers will entertain offers even though that may not be a visible option.It never hurts to ask for deals either on price or shipping.Those lots I missed in the past couple weeks were one of the Frog's biggest mistakes.I dropped out when bidding hit roughly the 15% of catalog mark thinking there would be other listings to hit on.One lot of world classics I passed on haunts me and will for a while,it contained a few issues that I'm quite sure were worth bidding three times what I did.

It's been a busy two weeks since returning from vacation. Not a lot of time for stamps, especially as I barely finished moving everything from my old upstairs stamp room to my new digs downstairs. Here is a picture of the new room. Looks a lot like the old room, but I have more room for literature (still upstairs, about 30 linear feet of shelves full--about nine meters) I have been lugging books, albums, and covers down the stairs for days now; I will save the literature for next week or next month :-)  A long, long, stamp room....At least I can see the trees in my yard when it's not dark outside!






The messy-looking cardboard boxes containing covers are a temporary thing. Eventually I plan to house the thousands of covers (and postcards) in loose-leaf notebooks. Much easier to browse, view, and find! An ongoing project to last half a lifetime, especially as I'm always seeking new material....like most of us collectors/accumulators!

When I'm rested up (and not working so hard at my day job!) I hope to contribute more to TSF, and share some recently acquired material.

Jim Wentzell
stampguyaps177-681

Hey, don't you mean this needs to go in the "Stamp Room Hall Of Fame"? Who else has a sink and microwave in their Stamp Room? Go ahead, raise your hands. Ok, here is my stamp room. This is just beside the couch where I actually work on my stamps. All of my stamps are stored in 3 white cabinets with doors on them in the back room, which no one in my house would dare even open. If I spend too much time in the back room, the wife complains about it, but I can sit on the couch, and work on stamps, all nite, every nite, and she doesn't care. LOL.

Today was our second stamp lunch with Beryllium Guy . We had come better prepared with tongs, catalogs, and lists of stamps. My haul for the day:

Started mounting Zimbabwe.

Late last night (thus, no pictures, sorry!) I took the paper cutter to some Scott album pages I had bundled and laying around.  3-hole punching and cutting down to 8.5 x 11 inches allows me to house the pages in a newer album.  The old two-hole green Scott albums they came from were from collections and odd lots I'd picked up over the last couple years.  Some nice early Venezuela, Uruguay and a bit of E countries (Eritrea, Epirus--one page only--and Estonia) they are much happier housed with my general collection than laying around waiting for a home :-)

At least I HOPE the stamps and album pages are happier; but I do know that **I** am :-)

Jim Wentzell
stampguyaps177-681

Today was Camroons and Cameroun day. Rechecked my inventory. Only 3 Camroons (66-68) but nice. A little more than 75 Cameroun stamps, 75% under the French Mandate. Some after Independance. That was easy compared to the re-do of my inventory of Argentina Ministerios (TI and TII)- Thanks to Nelson ! for the info.
René

Well I was moving along clearing up the mess I made with those soaked off stamps and then BAM ! What is that Manilla folder ? A small Turkey collection that is intended for my son-in-law as a Christmas gift.The folder was piled on top of the pages I had printed.Good thing I hit the rummage store the other day and picked up a couple three inch d-ring binders.Quite sure I still need page protectors and probably gonna run low on mounts.It seems to be about sixty pages of stamps and I'm not familiar at all with the issues of Turkey.Progress just left this house.

well Pete I do play a lot with heavy equipment and often my fingers retain the remnants of wrenching on them.Much better feeling for long term storage too.Bulk ? Weigh that against benefit and it's a no brainer.I had problems before with yellowing page edges, page protectors are archival safe and do exactly what they are designed to do.

Frog firstfrog2013 , I have (up to now) 600 stamps from Turkey inventoried and I agree with you.I had to get some help a few times.
Today was an easy day for me, finding some nice postmarks for my friend Jon, from Norway blaamand
René

I tried capturing images of gum / paper types - not very successful.

I just snapped a photo of a 1960 Hungarian stamp with the subject of Fairy Tales.

You can see the shiny gum they used which curls up most of the stamps. And... the watermark is clearly visible! I love watermarks like this!
I suppose the gum makes a difference. Also, I found scanning is worse than taking a photo of the gum.

Oh how I wish I could just sit and work work work. My brain doesn't function like that though.

I finally managed to print out the Hungarian album pages for 1960. But then I switched to different page protectors, so that necessitated a change in the page design. So I altered those album pages to suit & printed them all out. Then I find that this album does not include semi-postal issues! Well! There was room on one of the album pages with the Olympics souvenir sheet, so they fit in quite nicely with the theme & space on that page. Now I am on to 1961. There is very little info in this album I bought online, plus it is a mess looking at how they designed their pages. So I have to alter all pages to my wants & needs, adding semi-postal issues and shifting stuff around. I am using orange card stock for this album. I like coloured paper vice white, black (which I used before, like back in the 70's & 80's) or cream. It makes most of the stamps POP.

With everything else going on, I'll get these years & years mounted one of these months.

It'll keep me busy & out of trouble, not that I am ever in any trouble!




I also bailed out of the Trenton Stamp Club. The "secretary" called up just now reminding me of the meeting tonight. But I told him I am done with it. It is just a frenzy of buying/selling activity. That is all. I find that rather boring. Perhaps if I was a general world-wide collector, it would appeal to me. But concentrating on various countries, some obscure to the other members, is just not for me. I may go back at some point, as I have paid my dues for the year (all of $5), but...