The eight year moratorium on buying rubber stamps is over, my friends. I have gone back to my rubber crazed ways.
You may recall last weekend I went up to the city to attend the RubberRama stamp show. I got out of there with a few new stamps, two new ink pads, and a flyer for a Labor Day weekend warehouse sale. Naturally, I had to go to the sale. I was determined to buy some hugely discounted accessories so I could start making cards again plus maybe finally get some wooden blocks for my unmounted stamps. I drove up to Brisbane to fetch my best friend Denise Rehse, and swooped us off to Redwood City where we toured the backroads looking for Stein am Rhein Court, a most unlikely choice of names for a thoroughly industrial seaport. We found the warehouse and proceeded to spend two hours pawing through hundreds of unmounted images, bottles of embossing glitter, inkpads galore, and sheets of fancy paper. Denise found a lot of images but I only bought seven. I have specialized image requirements, and the stamp company (Love You To Bits) wasn't to my taste in general, being heavy on the cutesy angels, teddy bears, and school-use stuff. On the other hand, I got a really decent heat gun for wholesale price, and lots of useful wooden mounts for only $4 a pound so we both left happy.
Afterwards, we drove north again to Burlingame and had as much sushi as we could eat at Isobune. I wish I could afford to live around there. It's a lovely part of the peninsula with very old eucalyptus lining the roads and lots of beautiful homes. The shops in Burlingame are filled with desirable objects which call my name plaintively despite my relative poverty. We oohed and aahed over everything, even in the fancy schmancy dress shop where the sales clerks were so snotty and self-consciously thin they didn't ever deign to take notice of us in our pudgy, plebian bodies. We decided they'd thrown up one too many times and some of their brains had come out. Denise is having a major relationship with a hat there so we had to drop by to see it. She swears one day she'll buy it despite the clerks.
Now I've got my rubber stamp collection spread out on the table in seven 4.5 quart and two 1.8 gallon storage boxes. Tragically, during the move everything got jumbled up inside their boxes, and now I can't fit them all in again. It's maddening having just one left over each time when I know they all fit originally. It's worse than doing a crossword puzzle, I swear. Anyway, I've been happily fussing over them, trying out the new images, testing ink pads, squealing with delight when I rediscover favorite images, attempting to sort like images with like, but mainly just enjoying the possibilities as I look them over. A calm pleasure has spread throughout my soul.
Rubber stamps are therapeutic.
