Breaking up sets

Yes, all the time!

I break up a lot of my die sets. I have them sorted by shape, not how they were sold. For example all my hearts are together, all my stars, all my clouds, all trees, all foliage, all flowers, all borders, all nested shapes, everything stitched, etc. Usually when I'm creating I know what kind of die I want, just not a precise style or size sometimes.

I do break up my die sets. The stamp sets I keep together mostly because it’s easier to store them on those cards. However, all my stamps are cataloged by type—animals, background, etc. With the sets I’ll usually stamp 2 images. One is catalogued with the set and the other is put with its theme.

I've thought of doing this with my stamps. I've thought about it for years. I really, really want to. I think I'd use them more. But then the idea freaks me out, and I can't get started doing it.   

*Note* I hoard craft supplies, so there would be no purging. Just rearranging. 

I break up tool kits occasionally, when the tools won't necessarily be used together anyway, like scissors and tweezers.

I keep my stamp sets together, but that's because I'm thinking about the future and about giving them away. Whoever gets them is going to want complete sets. It's not hard for me as most of my sets are alphas. And since I store those as sets, its easy enough to keep the others in sets too.

I do break up my die sets though (they're not coordinated with the stamps.)

Try it!  You can take pictures of your sets and go back if you decide it's not for you, but if your collection is middling-large or bigger it really helps in my experience.  I think a lot of people are afraid of breaking up their sets because so many of the videos we watch are so careful about showing off a particular brand or style, but like anything else:

If your stuff isn't serving you, you're serving your stuff!

Use two systems to catalog my stamps: hand stamped images in a 3 ring binder seperated by themes and photos/ images of original stamp set on Evernote. Then I break them apart to file in pouches on my shelf. So much easier to find a stamp and easy to resemble the set if I want to get rid of it.

i also separate die sets by theme. 

I would really like to have all my sentiment stamps grouped together in one place.

I had someone ask me if I could add "thank you" to some cards I made and I had to go through all my stamps to see which ones had thank you sentiments I could use. It was a pain. I have a plan to stamp out all the sentiments in one place as a reference so next time I can just pull up that document and say "here are the thank you stamps I have, choose one." Luckily I don't have a huge number of stamps so that could work - if I know I'm looking for the the thanks from the curly butterfly set I can find that in 2 minutes. But knowing if there's actually a thank you on that set? right now that's something I'd have to check.

As to whether to keep one stamp I loved from a bigger set I didn't care for - I would hate to actually throw away the stamps I didn't use. But would I donate them? Maybe. My local thrift shop would still be able to sell them. (I would X out the stamp that was missing so the buyer would know). Would I offer them as a RAK? probably. Would I store them in a separate place so they didn't clutter up the "prime real estate" of my stamp storage bin? Definitely!