Unmounted Stamp Storage

Most of mine are on some sort of cushion, but I do have some that I took down to bare rubber. I changed from storing them in cd cases, though. What works best for me is storing each set on a piece of laminated cardstock in a storage box. The boxes I have let me cut laminated cardstock to 5x7; one of the boxes I put the cardstock the long way and the pieces are 5x11 for some of those bigger sets - but I made the cardstock fit the box instead of finding a box to fit my cardstock. I made some inserts for the boxes that are kind of like connected file folders and the laminated cards fit in those inserts. The reason for the inserts instead of just having the cards in the box is so that if some of the tiny stamps fall off the laminated cards, they are still contained in the same area as the rest of the set, so I don't end up with little stamps in the bottom of the box that I then have to figure out where they belong. You could accomplish the same thing with ziploc bags - but with the inserts it is really fast for me to flip thru all the sets in a box to find what I'm looking for.

Right now I have 6 or 7 of these boxes and each box holds about 30 sets of stamps. I could cram more in, but right now they are easy to flip through and look at what's there without removing them from the box. They are very roughly sorted so that if I need a background, I know which box to grab. One of my projects for this winter was supposed to be to create an index that would show an image of every stamp I have and a note of where it's stored, but the groundhog says there is supposed to only be 6 more weeks of winter and I'm not sure I'll get this done by my deadline:)

The reason I changed from the cd case storage was mainly the cost, and that it was getting challenging to find the full size cases. With the laminated cards, since I own a laminator, I can whip up more storage whenever I need it.

My boxes do have lids - they were some of those storage boxes like you can get at Michaels, nice and heavy and lids. But my mother did the same thing with the photo storage boxes that they have on sale all the time for a couple of dollars each; you just can't cut the laminated inserts quite as big. Having lids on the boxes means you can stack them - and on the bookcase that I have them on, they fit quite nicely two high on a shelf.