What’s taking so long?
Why is it taking so long to make any progress on this blog? I’m still working on my stamps, building up a good-sized pile of interesting stuff before I start cataloguing things. The goal is to sort as much as I can out of the massive amounts of unorganized stuff that I have. I will buy a new set of 2015 Scott catalogues and will also subscribe to Scott’s Stamp Monthly in order to keep up to date with the catalogue numbers of all future issues as well. Once I have these new catalogues, I’ll begin sorting through everything.
I have a lot of stamps that are ready for cataloguing. I’m up to almost 70 Kg of clean and sorted stamps ready for work. I don’t like leaving used stamps on paper and I also like to remove any gum or hinge remnants off of used stamps that are already off paper. This means I end up with huge amounts of stamps that need soaking, but I do make progress on stripping out the stamps that are ready to go now. Of course, this method means that gummed stamps (mint stamps especially) end up in the “ready to go” pile right away, so my collection will be heavily slanted towards the mint direction at first. The used stamps will gradually make their way into my collection later on.
Most of my time now is spent on sorting through off-paper groups. Some of them can go right into the “ready to go” pile, others will need soaking first. I haven’t been doing too much soaking lately, but every now and then I will put another load of them in the sink and get to work. For the most part, however, I’ve been sorting the off-paper stamps into various piles depending on the priority I want to give them. I’ll make a post soon that gives an example of this.
I’ll start making posts more often to this blog as I get “warmed up” and closer to the day when I start cataloguing. Once I’ve gone through the catalogues, I’ll have stamps ready to trade. I haven’t decided for sure how to do this, because 70 Kg is a LOT of stamps, somewhere just shy of a million. Probably I’ll just go through the countries according to weight (yes, I have weights for the stamps sorted for every country). That means Canada will come first, then likely Germany, then perhaps Russia (I once bought a large group of mint USSR stamps so these ones are ready to go already). Check in on this blog to watch the progress!
Ryan's Stamp Trading Blog 