O, Frabjous Day!

Thanks to Miss Julia, I am now virtually rubber-stamp-less, and it feels fabulous.

This morning I posted a note on Facebook wishing for someone to magically show up at my house, box up all my rubber stamps, and take them away to a good home. Lots of people posted alternate suggestions, including donating the stamps to a children's home or an orphanage. [Miss Julia and I, bagging up my collection of penis stamps and another of naked people and one of nuns and popes (no, I have no idea how I ended up with any of these, frankly--various series at various times, many of them custom made and impossible to buy), had a hearty chuckle over that. Imagine, if you will, the faces of the adults in charge as the children began to stamp their hands and faces with realistic depictions of Mr. Happy, custom made and lovingly rendered by Artists Whose Names You Would Recognize. Imagine.] All great suggestions, but that's not what I wanted. I've tried it the other ways--I've given tons of these away already over the years including the boxes and boxes I paid to ship to winners of drawings--and I know myself well enough to know that the ONLY way this would work would be for someone to come take everything with no time for me to look at each stamp and remember where I got it and what I did with it (we had some fabulous round-robins back then, with Artists Whose Names You Would Recognize (I'm not being coy; I don't know if they'd want to be mentioned) and tons of wonderful mail art. (My postman commented on it when it slowed down to a trickle and then ceased; he had enjoyed the years of delivering it.)

All in the past. What prompted the wish this morning was the report from a friend over the weekend about the death last summer of someone I knew long ago in the rubber stamp world. I read a tribute to the deceased in which someone told of dozens of friends working for over a week to sort through the belongings for an estate sale, and one of the things they had to sort was a huge, huge collection of rubber stamps. Many of my own stamps were from the collection of the deceased, and I suddenly realized that if I didn't find a home for these, they would meet the same fate: sold for a dime apiece at some estate sale after I'm dead.

Imagine The Poor EGE, trying to explain to some Baptist deacon and his wife why he was selling an array of running and flying and leaping nekkid people. And the pope! Plus images of--omigod, what IS that? Quelle horreur!

Since most of these stamps are no longer available, that would be a shame. So I put out the plea, and Miss Julia said she would be by at 1:08. Unfortunately, I didn't get the message because we were on a long walk. She came by (at 1:08, of course) but missed us. But because she is my Magical Fairy, she came back at exactly 4:10 this afternoon, and by 4:50, she was gone. In the interim, we were madwomen.

Here're the first two of the five drawers we tackled (I'd already emptied several others before she arrived). These are several layers of stamps deep. I refused to look at them, just scooping them into bags as fast as I could.

Here's the backseat of her new little VW, bags on top of bags (there were at least 10 big bags full, plus a couple bags of ink pads and re-inkers in the front)

 And the very cute Miss Julia (wearing, OMG, Bryn Walker! It's a wonder she got out of here still clothed) my Magical Fairy, driving away:

Yay! Thank you, Miss Julia--I feel ever-so-much lighter! Now I've got to find someone to take the assorted assemblage stuff. Rusty bottle caps, anyone?

[Note: The EGE spent the day in the kitchen packing up spare dishes so we can use half the cabinets for the cat food and chips that have until now been stored on shelving on the west wall, the wall that will be coming down in less than seven days to make space for THREE new windows. The countdown is on here at The Voodoo Cafe~~]