A Whole lot of stamps

Before I get to the stamps I have to back up a little. Back in the middle of August, there was an antique fair in Sunnyvale, hosted by the Sunnyvale Historical Society. Since I'm now a member of that group, I had gotten the heads up that the antique fair was going to be something that I didn't want to miss. The event was held at the Sunnyvale museum and had an area set up outside with many tables for groups to display things of interest, such as the Lace Museum having someone working on making traditional lace.They also had a few tables set up with antiques for sale. I picked up a few things.I got a Kodak camera from 1917 with its case for $25, a coat and hat wall hook for $4 (I just figured out where I'm going to mount it!), a hand-stitched handkerchief for 25 cents, and some neat *huge* geological survey maps for a couple of dollars total.At another set of tables was the San Jose Postcard Club and the San Jose Stamp Club. I got a neat vintage stamp for stopping by.I began chatting with some of the gentlemen at the SJ Stamp Club booth and was telling them how I use old postage stamps in some of my collage art pieces. They were very interested to hear what kinds of projects I was working on and eventually invited me to one of their club meeting where I was invited to share some of my different projects. I really enjoyed that.One of the members made available to me a huge quantity of stamps at a very low price. Many of the stamps had little to no value so letting them go in bulk was not an issue. So on another day, we arranged I would come to collect what turned out to be 4 big boxes of stamps. Some were stamps that were still backed on old bits of envelopes, but most of the stamps were loose.One box was entirely international. Another box was US only.Some stamps had been sorted and bound into small bricks.Those were the cutest ones. I couldn't resist taking a picture of just those arranged in a bowl.In the end, there were so many stamps that it was necessary to share. Thank goodness I knew the right people to contact. My friend Pamela who does correspondence art got half the stash (and she was kind enough to reimburse me for half of the modest donation price I originally paid). She's going to do amazing things with these stamps I'm sure! With my portion, I gave two-thirds of that to the art department at my children's school. The last third I kept for myself to play with. For me less is better. I easily become overwhelmed if I have too much of anything. Still, my stash is easily 500 stamps of really neat international and US stamps. I think I'm set for life with stamps!