The post Christmas clean up

I always find myself doing this at this time of year. While I'm putting all the Christmas crafting stuff away, I get into tidy & organise mode. Last year I unmounted almost all my wood mount stamps- the only ones not done are some really large ones, and my Christmas stamps, as they were still packed in their box.So doing the Christmas stamps was something I intended for this year.

Here they all are, off their mounts, and labelled with post-its, so I can add the info to the catalogue pages. Not something I bothered with years ago, before blogging, but I do like to be able to include that info when I use a stamp, although, to be truthful, many of these stamps I've had for years, and most are probably discontinued now.
 This time I have not added cushion foam to them, leaving them as bare rubber. I've bought  a few packs of Tack n Peel, which I've applied to some acrylic blocks, and I'm going down that route now. Takes up even less storage space. As the Tack n Peel only goes on one side, and is completely clear, I can still use the opposite side of the block for foam mounted stamps.Now theres a thing- I had a look at a few with foam on, and wondered how difficult it would be to strip them all back to bare rubber. I discovered that a number of my older stamps actually separated from the foam cleanly with complete ease.

Stamp on the right, mounting foam on the left. No residue at all. I also found any dried on sticky residue can be removed with a pan scourer- saves on the fingerprints, lol.
 Not all of the foam would come off easily, some was still well adhered, so I'm leaving those. Clearly, over the years the adhesive loses its stick, and I can live with unmounting from the foam as a gradual process.


So after this it was time for a bit of a clean up. Especially since Beloved Hubby has been renovating my old craft room for him to do all his computer repairs in, there is enough dust about to carve your name in, even with closed doors.Removed everything from my desk and gave it a good clean. Thats the last time it'll be that clean and tidy!

                                      Told you it wouldn't be long.

Anyway, while I was tidying, I set up my Silhouette for a couple of projects I had in mind. A few weeks ago, I saw some stencils in use that looked really useful- one was letters & numbers, another was circles.I considered browsing the net to see where they were on sale, when I saw my Silhouette out of the corner of my eye, and thought ' don't be daft, cut your own'. So I spent an hour or so making them up, and I stored the files till I got round to them. Today seemed the perfect opportunity.

 First one, the letters & numbers.With some patches of circles to break it up & fill up the spaces. Bonus is I also have all the letters & numbers it cut out to make little masks.

 Next one was some circles- just made this a half page size- I got bored making circles, lol.

 Final one I cut was some stencil font numbers.