Stamping Plate Binder

I love stamping. It may not be what got me into nail art, but it turned a mild hobby into a full blown obsession! For a while I just had my stamping plates in a tin box, but if you've followed this blog for a bit, you'll know I like to SEE my equipment. I didn't have many plates at the time, but I knew I wanted a better way to store them. Then one day I saw a video by PlasmaSpeedo on YouTube. She was showing how she made a binder to store her plates. She got the idea from another blogger, who probably got it from someone else, and so on. I'm not sure who came up with the idea first, but it was brilliant.

Make your own after the jump!

Take a standard 3-ring binder. Get some plastic pages for it that are usually used for baseball cards. You can find this at supermarkets, hobby stores, or in my case, comic book or game stores (I played Magic: The Gathering for years and worked at a game store for a few years.) I tried to get a pic of the pages for you guys but they are clear and didn't show up on film well. Next was what I thought would be the harder thing to find, but I got it at a dollar store so I guess it wasn't all that uncommon. I'm not sure what it's supposed to be, but I guess its just a rubber thingy you put down in shelves to keep things from sliding around. It's not sticky, just rubbery.

Cut it into rectangles smaller than the card sleeve pocket.

The hard part in this whole process is getting the silly rubber thing INSIDE the pocket. I found a chopstick or pencil to push it into place helped a lot. Get it to lay flat in there. This keeps the plates from sliding out of the pocket again.

Slide your plates in and you are ready! Most standard sized plates will fit. I don't have any hex shaped ones but I think they will fit as well. I only place the plates on one side of a page. Putting them on both sides just makes the 2 plates stick to each other, not to the pocket, so they tend to slide more. And double siding makes each page heavier and more unwieldy.

One thing I love about this binder is that it is very easy to keep adding pages. If you have the wonderful problem of filling your binder (I wish I had that problem!) you can get a bigger one, or a second one. At one point the binder is gonna get pretty heavy so I suggest either a Trapper-Keeper like binder that can zip around the edges, or several binders. I keep my plates organized by company. BundleMonster on the first few pages, then Salon Express, then Kiss Fing'rs and so on. Feel free to sort them however you like. Maybe you want to keep flower images together, or maybe you want your full nail images separate from your french tips? It's your book so have fun!