Having to be away for 20 days or so..i am unable to bid or list on the auctions. So i am forced to mount stamps in my own albums. I started out with the Netherlands Indies...but now that GAP between Dutch control and independant Indonesia is starting to interest me. The so called "revolutionary issues"..there is no shortage of them on the internet and they are not expensive..except for the rarities of course .
Doing the approvals and auctions is fun, but isn't it nice to putter on your own collection for a bit? I love taking stamps out of a drying book and getting the pleasure of sorting and putting them away after all the work of carefully soaking them. And I really REALLY enjoy taking an envelope of one issue and flyspecking them. A pile of used stamps becomes fascinating - all the variation in cancels, slight color differences, hunting for that one extremely fine copy for the main collection and then there are the delightful finds like perfins or plate varieties or singles from booklets or inverted watermarks. That's a mini treasure hunt! FUN stuff!!!
Enjoy yourself!
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"Just one more small collection, hun, really! LoL "
I've been doing the same during this week and I have really enjoyed going through material I have been holding for that "someday" when I had time to work on it.
The result is I have added stamps to my Guernsey, Iceland, Ireland, Isle Of Man, Jersey, Norway, Papua New Guinea, and Thailand collections, while at the same time adding more quality duplicates.
Same here! Now that I've opened the collectors barn door by joining this site, I've gotten curious beyond my Franklins... this month I've opened some boxes I haven't been into in 30 years.
And finding surprises... my old Scott Minuteman album from 1972. I thought it was empty, I had certainly pulled out all the 20th century stuff. Today I found that I left the 19th century stamps in the album! And there's some decent stuff in there that I never knew I had.
When I am working on my stamps, I am always looking for stamps to put in my albums first. Empty spaces are filled, and better quality stamps are swapped out if any are found. As I work through the stamps, I also ID stamps that I don't need, put them in 102 cards and file them in the selling stock drawers. If I am working on dismantling a collection or a large accumulation from a country, I work it the same way, but often put the stamps directly into an APS Sales book, or an SOR approval book. I think it saves time to do both at the same time.