Help With Hinges And An Embarassing Confession...

I don't know if it's my technique, hinge quality or what but.....I can't seem to hinge a stamp to save my life.

Each time my practice stamps wind up not wanting to stick to the paper or miserably flattened to the page, as if The Hulk had a personal vendetta against it's face.

An I the only one? Could I be doing it wrong? Is there a shining paragon of delicious hingey perfection ai don't know about?

I can't afford, nor want, mounts and stock pages in my final albums. My budget forces me to go homemade with my albums as it is and I need my mounts for higher value sets.

Could someone please white knight this poor sausage fingered damsel in distress?

Are they pre-folded hinges? Some of the earlier hinges weren't pre-folded and it was common to accidentally moisten the wrong sides of the hinge, because the "shiny" (gummed) side of the hinge was not readily apparent.

Moisten the hinge only very lightly. In fact, some find the use of a Q-Tip helpful to use.

There are a number of Youtube videos on how to hinge stamps.

Here's one from Kennmore Stamps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OLJFowAEmw

Hope that helps!

Dan

I agree with Wt1, you could be moistening the wrong side of the hinge... What brand are they?

They're uni Canada

I don't know exactly what kind of difficulty you are having...but one problem I had when starting out is that I tried to be too perfect. That sounds kind of silly, but I spent way too much time trying to get the hinge exactly lined up, and centered. What I found out is that it didn't make too much difference if it was lined up or not. If it is more or less near the top, and no part of the hinge shows beyond the 4 edges of the stamp, you are good to go. If the stamp is reasonably centered in it's space that is close enough. If the stamp is not correctly placed vertically (angled a bit to the right or left) you can bend the stamp to a straight position...and a bit of pressure will set the bent part of the hinge in a slightly straighter position...and the weight of the pages will hold it while it dries.

Now you should have a reasonably centered top to bottom/right to left/& almost exactly straight stamp. Like anything else, after you have done a couple of hundred stamps (that's not all that many really) you should have a good grip on centering the stamp in the space & keeping the tops of all your stamps even.

That's assuming that is what you were having trouble with in the first place...