Ordering more kiloware !?!

In order to facilitate the trading I've been doing lately, I realized that I needed more USA stamps so I started looking to order some kiloware.

Of course, I couldn't buy just one batch of kiloware. I searched around and read many online ads, and finally decided to make a purchase from B. Schulze Stamps, a company I remember purchasing from when I was just a girl. They have never disappointed me. I had to do some digging to find them, as I noticed that they don't have a website. I went to my online Linn's subscription and found they still are advertisers there and had a phone number listed, so I placed a call.

I ordered the following:
1 lb. British Commonwealth
1Lb. USA mission mix
1 lb. World Elita mix
2500 off paper USA regulars (I have several partners looking for USA definitives, especially coils, booklets, etc)
and for good measure asked them to send some stuff on approval as they still send out lots and singles on approval and I thought I'd see what they had these days.
Now, mind you, I probably have no business buying anything except the US kiloware as I have way too many other stamps. But somehow I rationalized this by saying I needed some new trading stock as what I had was getting "stale". Actually, what I need to do is finish soaking and sorting what has been laying around here, but I've been working on that.

If anyone would like me to review these mixtures, please let me know and I'll put pictures and my analysis of what I thought of each purchase.

I am also considering ordering another Great Britain mission mix from the charity I buy from occasionally. What do you think? Should I buy some GB too or wait? Maybe I should sort the huge box of GB that I have sitting around....hmmm....

I will be writing more soon. I have been receiving trades from folks and so have been busy trying to put together packets for you.
Remember, my trading offer still stands if you are interested, just search this blog for Trading Offer.

Snowed in Today - Australia Stamps

Today I am snowed in here in Mertztown. We have gotten over 2 feet of snow (on top of the 18-20" already on the ground from this past Saturday).

I was logged in to my work network, but it keeps kicking me out and now I can't get back in at all, so I realized that I have time to work on my stamps. Yay!

I have noticed that I need many, many Australia stamps from the last 20 years or so. Earlier than that I have quite a few, but of course not all. Australia is one of my favorite countries. I would be willing to trade any of my duplicates for Australia that I need (see my trade offer).

I also want to talk about some of the more in-depth collecting one can get involved in, particularly in Australia. There are of course, many types of specialized variety collecting that one can do and I am only touching on a small piece of that area of collecting today.

I have a copy of "The 1D. King George V Australian Commonwealth Stamps, Surface Printed Types, 1914 to 1947". This publication contains detailed information and illustrations of such things as papers, watermarks, retouches and plate varieties. Personally, I am especially interested in the plate varieties, which involve such things as variances in line thicknesses of frames or letters due to retouches, small flaws visible as a result of plate wear prior to plates being retouched, and the like.

Another great publication for all sorts of detailed information on Australia is the Brusden White Australian Commonwealth Specialists Catalogue. This is a terrific catalogue for anyone who wants to work on a more in-depth Australia collection. My own Australia collection still has a long way to go, but I like to know that I have the resources to do more detailed research if I choose to. This catalog has just about all the information on varieties of Australia and states that one could ask for. Collecting the Australia states can get quite complicated and this catalogue has been a tremendous help to me.

Of course, the internet is an excellent source of information as well, and I often do a search online if I am trying to find out more about a variety, as one can find good pictures in auction catalogues or even exhibits that collectors have posted online. Best of all, most of the information you can find online is free.

In closing, if anyone wants to trade Australia stamps, I am especially interested in that country at the moment. The 2 collections I have been spending the most time on lately are Australia and India. (See my trade offer in the post prior to this one.)

If anyone else wants to share what you have been focusing on lately, or what sorts of specialization you do in certain countries, it would make for an interesting discussion.

Happy Stamping!

Trade Stamps - My Trade Offer

Today I want to discuss trading stamps. I would like to set up a simple trade system whereby we can quickly and easily trade, while having fun. Because I work a lot of hours I can't spend time looking up wantlists, but would love to try trading with some of you.

Here is the trade that I propose:
Send me any postally used stamps that you would like to trade. I will look through your stamps and take the ones that I can use, and replace them with worldwide stamps from my stock. The stamps that I cannot use, I will send back to you untouched and as I received them. I will not take damaged stamps and will return them with the ones that I cannot used. I will not send damaged stamps in exchange, either.

I collect mainly British Commonwealth, but often take worldwide in trade for children I know who collect, friends, etc. And sometimes I decide to add other countries to my collections, such as helping my daughter collect Japan, so send what you have and I'll see what I can use. It changes from time to time anyway.

I will try to send a large stamp for a large stamps, small for small.

Please enclose the following in the envelope with the stamps:
Your name and address I am to ship to, written clearly
Any preference as to used only or willing to accept some mint and/or CTO;(please note I don't have a lot of mint stamps and 95% of my trading stock is used)

Please do NOT send wantlists, requests for countries or themes, types of stamps, etc. Don't send extremely high value items either, because I am only sending back my trading stock against it, and I probably don't even know the value of your stuff at the time I receive it.

If you have other trades to propose, you can feel free to email me or write a letter, but I don't fill specific stamp wantlists. I do sometimes work out deals such as my country for yours, on-paper trades, etc.

Here is my address for trading:

Susan Boyer
58 Hertzog School Rd.
Mertztown, PA 19539
USA

Please feel free to email me with any questions, and happy stamping!

Don't feel bad if it takes me a couple of days to read your email, I'm not ignoring you, just short on time.

Sending stamps to Indonesia

Today I am making up a stamp trade to send to Indonesia. A fellow collector contacted me via Facebook with a trading request. It has taken me way too long to get her stamps together but this is the first free weekend I've had in a while.
I had never thought to use Facebook as a vehicle for meeting other collectors or trading stamps, but I am there if anyone wishes to contact me. My full name is Susan Boyer.
Does anyone else use Facebook or similar websites to meet new trading partners and other collectors? I'd love to hear about it if you do. I am interested to hear how everyone else connects with other collectors.
The stamps I am sending to Indonesia are used Great Britain and Australia from my trading stock. These are mostly stamps that I have soaked from various kiloware purchases over the years, so I have many duplicates of some of them.
As I was putting together this trade packet, I thought I'd share with you how I organize my stock and invite the rest of you to share your own methods. My system is not very original. It is neat and organized and works for me.
I have soaked a lot of kiloware over the years, so I have a great deal of duplication in some stamps from countries for which I purchase a lot of kiloware. When I soak, I sort everything first by country then complete sorting based on what I need at the moment or which stamps I have the most of. Each country that I collect extensively (GB, Australia & States, New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia, and USA for right now, because I have a lot of these countries) has a plastic shoebox of stamps from that country. Once items are soaked and dried, I put them in larger glassines and put them in those boxes. Countries that I don't have such huge quantities of simply go in large glassines labelled with country name and all go in one box, with those glassines in ABC order.
Once I want to sort a certain country, I get the box or glassine for that country and sort by era and denomination, usually choosing a certain period to focus on unless I don't have very many for that country. I sort by sets and then finally by catalog number, setting aside sets requiring additional research such as watermarking or perfing for last. I file all my sets by catalog numbers in #4 glassines in long 3x5 card file boxes, similar to some dealer boxes but 3x5 sized. I put all stamps for a set that I have in those glassines, so some have many duplicates and some sets might have more than one glassine.
I use these boxes for both sorting through for stamps to fill album spaces and for trading purposes. Most of my countries I kind of know how far I am in mounting stamps, so I know which sets are available for trading.
On my stamp wish list right now is stamps from India, India states, and more recent New Zealand. But I like all stamps! Which is why I have so many...sigh.. and why my library is full of stamps and not more books.
I think I will clean my library a bit now.

Bye!

It's been a long time- India stamps today

I have had some things going on in my life that took up a lot of time, including elder care issues and job training that caused me to have to set my stamps aside for a while.

I am hoping to have some time to devote to them and to this blog. I apologize for neglecting this blog for so long. I will try to post here occasionally.

Today I am looking at what India stamps I have around. I printed out the album pages for the classic period of India from a disk I purchased a while ago from http://www.stampalbums.com/ which is one of my favorite Philatelic websites. You do have to subscribe, but if you are interested in putting your stamps in albums, or (like me) want to being able to print out pages to give to your children, other folks' children, etc., all in an extremely affordable format, check out their site now! Sorry to go off on a tangent here, but I can't say enough about this site, it has changed the face of philately. I am not paid to advertise for them nor do I know the site owner. I'm just a satisfied customer.

I have a small pile of classic India on my desk, starting with a Queen Victoria single star watermark 2 anna pale blue issue. According to the Stanley Gibbons catalog, this one comes in pale blue or in blue, but I think any used issues would be pretty difficult to discern whether they were faded or pale blue. But I am guessing mine is pale blue. At any rate, there is only one album space for it so I don't feel a need to distinguish. Most of my classic India is well used and not in top condition, but I still find them to be attractive stamps.



One of the things that is interesting about this series of Queen Victoria stamps is that, according to the Stanley Gibbons catalog, they are the first stamps issued after Queen Victoria declared herself the Empress of India.
What I wonder is did the Queen of England ever actually set foot in India? Does anyone know enough India history to be able to answer this? Or perhaps a Royal Family member serving in the British military?

~Suzi~

Kiloware Sources

Now that my home internet connection is restored and I am catching up things on I can continue with my project of trying to list some kiloware sources.

The first source I wanted to list is the charity which I purchased the 2 kg of Great Britain mixture:

BMS World Mission
PO Box 49
129 Broadway
Didcot Oxfordshire OX11 8XA
Registered Charity Number 233782

The contact person who I ordered through is: David McLellan- Dmclellan@bmsworldmission.org

This mission also sells world mixtures, but I have not purchased any of the worldwide mix from them yet.
This is the mixture that I reviewed and showed photos of in my April 23, 2006 posting, so you can take a look there if you want to see the mixture that I received. It is a true charity mixture, with plenty of duplication as expected, but I was quite happy with the mixture. Also, I felt there was a surprisingly low percentage of damaged in this mix.

I will be posting more kiloware sources, including recommendations from readers. There is also a collector who purchases large quantities of kiloware who is sending a sample of some kiloware that he occasionally sells to other collectors when he has some to spare. I will write more about him when I receive the sample mixture and can show you a scan.

Suzi
suziboyer@hotmail.com

Heavy rain and flooding

My internet connection has been down at home since the weekend, so I am writing this form work, which I am glad to have reached safely.
We have had days of heavy rain here in the Northeast US, and our rain gauge is overflowing. Tonight it rained more, and my morning commute was quite interesting. There is no really easy way for me to get down off of our hilltop, but I chose what I hoped was the safest route. There were a lot of washouts, but no water deeper than 6 inches and no trees or other insurmountable obstacles across the road for the first 12 miles, so I thought I was doing pretty good. There is a two-lane road that I take which is on a narrow ledge; it has small cliffs going up on your left, a few stories high, and a one story drop off the right hand side down to a large stream, which the road follows in a winding, twisting fashion. The road is paved well, and it is generally quite picturesque, winding through woods and past 200 year old mills and stone houses. Today that stream was a raging brown river sweeping along lawn chairs and debris like toys. It was fascinating to watch.
Since the road is elevated above the stream for most of the way, I figured that I was safe. I was enjoying the antics of the surging waters when I saw a few orange cones in the road. They looked like they had been tossed there carelessly, and 2 were lying on their sides- perhaps swept away by water rushing down the road overnight. I slowed down but saw no danger so kept going. About a half-mile further along, I saw on my right that a tree was down over top of electric/utility wires (there are poles with wires that cross that stream, and there are so many wires you'd think the weight would pull the poles down). I slowed again and was looking down to my right at the devastation-- the huge tree was still halfway supported by the wires, which weren't broken yet, like it was across a hammock. Then I approached a sharp left curve, and in front of my Astro van were more wires, with one of them right across my path. The wires sloped down from the cliffs and towards the water, so were higher on the lefthand side than on the right. I stopped altogether to think for a minute. There was definitely not enough room to turn my van around right there, between the cliffs and the guard rail and the wires. I moved to the lefthand lane, hoping that no one would come around the curve from the other direction, as the curve is so sharp that they wouldn't see the van or the wires until it was too late (remember, we drive in the righthand lanes here in the US). I stuck my head out the window to judge the height of my van versus the wires, and then backed up, folded my lefthand mirror against the side of the van, and proceeded slowly under the wires in the left lane, scraping the cliffs slightly on the driver's side.
Thank goodness it fit. I was glad to be around that curve. I was almost to the end of that road, with about 1/4 of a mile to go. There were no more wires or trees down in the road, but lots of mud and water. At the end of the road, I saw one small caution horse and an orange cone in the righthand lane, in a half-hearted attempt to close the road. I got out and left a large note on the highway horse, on the back of a brown paper grocery bag I found in my van. "CAUTION-WIRES ACROSS ROAD". I stuck a tree branch in the metal clamp on the horse and firmly impaled my note on it. Hopefully it will stay put for a while, until someone does a better job of closing the road.
Sorry, no stamps yet today, but I thought you might be interested in what was going on here in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me, so I tried to give you a good description.

If anyone else is experiencing flooding, tell us about it! I'd love to hear. And please be safe!

Lately I've been trying to identify and file various Commonwealth items, so I may have some questions soon for all of you, as you are so knowledgable and helpful. But it will have to wait until my internet connection at home is back up, so I have use of my scanner.