What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Been busy mounting stamps from various locations thru 1959. Korea, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Viet Nam, Monaco, Spanish Guinea, Spanish Morocco, Portuguese Guinea, Portuguese India, and many others. Also found another stash of uncatalogued WW glassines in one of my U.S. boxes.

Finally finished soaking and cleaning up a bunch of Great Britain penny reds. Hinges & gunk all gone!

Now, maybe I might be able to start plating some of them

A few months ago, I started cleaning my stamp desk and area. The project was ongoing, very, very slowly. This week it came to a stop. We have invited my sister-in-law to move in with us. She is a funny lady and will be wonderful to have around but the guest room (her soon to be room) is my STAMP ROOM! I am now moving everything downstairs into the game/toy/TV/library room and a closet or two. I have reconfirmed that I have to much accumulation and not enough collection. It is my own fault.

I did buy a few nice US Postal Agency in China stamps this week.

She could manage the stamp room for you!

What jokingly passes as my study is a small third bedroom, which, in the Efwardian era, would have been a maid's room, with parents in one larger room, children in the other. I'd hate to think of restoring it to a state in which a normal person could safely enter it.

just had an enjoyable hour of putting french stamps from 1963 to 1979, into a lighthouse hingeless album, hope to carry on later today.

Always good to have a stamp room but I try to keep mine study so never really leave anything out overnight. The goal for today is mount some Laos stamps.

My big goal is to get my office/stamp room/escape room/spare room put back together. We just completed a good deal of work in the house (new paint, new floors, etc.), and the room where I normally work on my collection is in shambles.

I spent a few minutes this morning adding some text to a few Steiner pages for Haiti. I'll mount the stamps on those pages sometime this weekend.

I was looking for a recent thread here on SCF that seems to have been deleted.

Finished laying out the last of another 100+ fresh Steiner pages. These are another selection of stamps pulled from my old Part II thru Part IV binders. Let the mounting begin!

Identifying some Laos stamps using an index sheet in preparation for printing the needed Steiner pages and mounting them.

In the past 24 hrs, I mounted 663 stamps across 113 pages of the stack I had prepared. Probably have another 50 pages to go with half being France on Steiner pages that are essentially duplicates of my Scott Specialty pages. I have so many duplicates of the classic stamps that I figured mounting another set was worth the effort.

This box arrived on my doorstep about a month ago. It was an auction lot consisting of two massive two post Harris Albums, A-G countries. It had been correctly described but poorly photographed and the estimate was MUCH, MUCH, more than I considered reasonable so I entered a holding bid just to keep it on my screen and see what happened. Low and behold, I got it! Paid more in Postage than I did for the lot.

As described, the owner had, in the 1960's (?), carefully wrapped every mint stamp in a separate little package of cellophane or, occasionally glassine paper or even wax paper. The cellophane had become brittle and discoloured and had shrunk causing the stamps to ripple.

My task was to unwrap every stamp and iron, yes iron, out the ripples in the paper. And it actually worked about 80% of the time. It took forever but the upside was that I have a really nice bunch of complete, mint, George VI definitive sets from A - G countries to add to my own collection.

Down side was that I had to buy a new iron for laundry. I was told that the old one was now hopelessly compromised. And the house, from bedrooms to basement, is littered with little shiny bits of static driven cellophane that three (so far) vacuumings have not completely eradicated. And this just after we got Christmas Tree needles out of the rug.

I suppose I could also write a small monograph on the effects of wrapping stamps in various materials, but I suppose that will have to wait. I would really like to get my hands on the remaining volumes, H-Z, but would have to sneak it into the house under cover of darkness as I think the prospect of another month of debris sifting through the house would not do wonders for domestic bliss.

In the last two weeks I have:

Finished sorting and hinging stamps from Sweden. I was amazed at how many I had. I figure the collection is 3/4's complete to 1990.

Reorganized what I had for Jamaica into 1 binder.

Got half way through Bahamas and hope to finish this evening.

Came to the conclusion that I have wayyy too many stamps but there is a club auction tomorrow and there is no doubt I will go home with more

Dianne

I had a dream about Steiner pages.

That was my belly laugh for the day
that tickled me.