Once Stuck, Now Stored

So I’ve been adding a bunch of neat flat items to my collection lately including stickers, cards, sheets of notepaper, and other odds and ends and now that my collection has grown to the size it has, I’m running into problems in regards to storage.

How best to store all these different flat items?

For the trading cards, I have sleeves of different varieties with each different type of sleeve suited to a different sort of card and situation. Regardless of the condition of the cards in question, they all get sleeved no matter what and once sleeved, they get stored into one of my many cardboard boxes designed specifically to store trading cards in bulk.

For my shitajiki collection, I sleeve them all into clear binder-sized sheet protectors and then clip them all into a binder with locking rings. This method works like a charm, but there is the caveat of what may happen if the binder is turned upside down. Personally, I prefer to just not think about it and make sure I keep the binder right side up!

For my clear file collection, I store them in a large box that came with a bulk order of clear files that I had placed a while back. The box’s length and width dimensions are nearly the exact size of a clear file and so it makes perfect sense for me to use it to keep storing my clear file collection. If I run out of room, it is entirely possible for me to use a bunch of 28 pound weight brown kraft 10″ by 13″ envelopes.

For things like playing cards, I simply leave them in their boxes and since they’re kind of bulky, I store them all in another larger box. Right now, in fact, I have a box of playing cards of all sorts from X-Men themed UNO decks to Pokemon themed poker decks to some random bootlegged anime-themed poker decks. For a good measure, I also have a random box of poker chips in there, too.

But how about for things like… stickers?

Like… a LOT of stickers?

Say… maybe 100+ different-sized sheets of stickers for a grand total of 2000+ individual stickers (which still doesn’t take into account multiple boxes of individual square stickers which adds another several hundred to the count and several books of stickers)?

When I was a kid, I thought sticker albums were kind of cool. They were a neat way to show off your sticker collection and it was great fun to pass the time over the course of an afternoon by just sitting down and sticking and unsticking and resticking stickers.

… But then I got older and realized that in order to keep my stickers in good condition, I couldn’t stick them anywhere and so, predictably, I stopped using sticker books/albums because most of the albums were the peel-and-stick sort.

Fast forward a bunch of years and now I’m facing the problem of not knowing how best to store my sticker collection.

Of course, there are always options like boxes (which is what I’m using right now), but boxes seem like a bit of an inelegant solution for items that are meant to be seen.

In the course of thinking of possible storage solutions, I came up with the notion of creating my own version of a sticker album by using photo album pages to display my stickers.

At the beginning, it seemed like a neat and workable solution – for a while, I thought I had found the answer to my growing problem. But once I start tucking in the sticker sheets, I found myself confronted with a new problem.

It isn’t that the sticker sheets are too big for the album pages because they certainly aren’t. They are, however, big enough to not want to share much space and with who-knows-how-many sticker sheets in my collection…

Yeaaah.

I’m not about to spend that kind of money to give each sheet its own individual album page which means I’m back to the drawing board at square one.

Collecting – it isn’t just about what you collect… it is also how you display them!