Show your DIY album pages

biglavalamp........I can send you 7 or 8 different if you send me your address through a Forum message.

Londonbus1

It is always a pleasure to drop in on this thread and see the variety of pages created; well done to all that have shown. Of some of the more recent material, I am taken with the simplicity of Jack's (banknoteguy ) efforts; the re-use, re-cycle, re-duce sentiment is an added bonus ;-)

djcmh        Huge amount of work !! Congrats

René

Good catch gatodiablo, you are correct. I should have caught that.

angore, I like that I was toying with making a Stamp from Every Country but was using this project to sharpen my skills with LaTeX. So I was trying out stuff, as is all too often the case the real world got in the way, although that does pay for my stamps I only mind a little bit.

I like the look of your pages.

To me, LaTeX is another take on a mark up language (back to way documents were initially created using a computer text editor - mainframe then PC) before we got WYSIWYG. Once someone has defined a style, it makes any text look professional.

I finished this morning entering all spaces in the ASFEC album.  It was very educational especially since I know little about certain regions. The structure / layout illustrates the dilemma between postal entity versus a geographical organization.

For example a purist geography approach would have all the occupation or remote offices issues in the country rather than associated with the issuing home country.  Interestingly. Scott puts all Japanese occupancy issues in geographical region but offices are in the parent county.

Then there are odd ball countries like UAR that was Egypt and Syria for a just a couple years but do not see a specific space in the ASFEC for it although it is noted as a comment.

There is no single method.

You have a date typo a few lines under your "France" title - 6/7/18/77 should be 6/7/1877.  And for YT #83 Bd, "Grely-Yellow" is also a typo.  The stamp before that, #83 Bc, has a line under it which isn't centred - that might just be because it's too long and would run into the text for the next stamp.  Maybe "Lt. Grey" instead of "Light Grey" would free up enough space.

Ryan

I started making my own album pages out of frustration. I respect everything that Steiner is doing, but I didn't want to follow the Scott order because separating standard postage, semis, and airmail stamps is like separating Romeo and Juliet: it can be done, but that doesn't mean it should be done. I even went hardcore Minkus for a while and mixed in postage dues, postal tax stamps, and all the other behind-C-back-of-the-book stuff, but I decided I didn't like that. I tried several pagemaking applications, but I'd never really designed a major project and I found out that correcting layout decisions that looked like a good idea at the time but weren't could mean full-time enrollment in the School of Hard Knocks.

Then I heard about Vario pages and got some inspiration. When I'm dealing with stamps that loosely fall under the "commemorative" or "topical" umbrellas, I like to spend a few minutes looking up something about who or what is on them, and maybe why somebody thought it was cool to put that subject on a stamp.

Here's a sample of what I spend some of my afternoons doing.


(I didn't want to put a full-size scan up and I might have reduced it too much. If you want me to rescan it at a larger size, tell me and I can do that later this week. But it takes rather a long time to load as it is.)

There are a few things that you can't do with Varios. Obviously, there isn't an easy way to identify each stamp individually, unless you want to get stick small Avery labels right on the pockets, and I absolutely do not recommend that. Or put slips of paper in between the stamps, and that takes up way too much room. For a while, I reserved the last row of each page for a typeset slip that spanned the whole row and put some description in. That could work for some people, but it didn't for me because I write too much. So I ended up interleaving: each Vario sheet is preceded and followed by an 8½" x 11" sheet of Hammermill ivory paper, and that's where I put my notes.

The added bonus is that I can edit out what I don't want. I don't bother eliminating the boring stamps from the Norway lineup because there aren't that many of them. But as I'm very interested in Slavic and Eastern European history, I naturally have accumulated thousands of stamps of wildly varying aesthetic and informational quality. Romanian portraitists? Sure! Polish farm animals or endangered small mammals from Serbia? Absolutely! An eight-stamp set celebrating the Fraternal Socialist Armies Sheep-Tossing Championship Olympiad? I can curate an Eggdog's Finely Illustrated Cavalcade of Mildly Interesting Facts without those guys, so I skip 'em.