A 'little' stamping challenge

I spent a lot of time last week deciding, un-deciding and re-deciding what I wanted to put on my Stampin' Up!^® order during the Sale-A-Bration promotion. After a bit of hair-pulling, I finally hit the Submit button on my order, and I realized that I ordered quite a few more stamp sets on this order than I have in quite a while.

When I first started buying Stampin' Up! products, I ordered a lot of stamp sets. (And that was back before the stamp images were die-cut in the rubber; you had to trim each stamp image before applying it to the wood block. So while it was immensely fun to pull all those stamp sets out of the shipping box, it was decidedly not fun to cut them all apart.) But as my stamp collection has grown, grown some more and even outgrown my stamping space (despite having donated about thirty sets to our local Ronald McDonald House Charities and pulling out another group of sets to go in a second donation), I've slowed down a bit in how many new sets I purchase. Don't get me wrong, I still love Stampin' Up!'s stamps and would probably by all of them if I had unlimited funds and space. But sadly, a girl has her limits.

So as I await the new stamps that will be arriving next week, I was thinking about the dozens (hundreds? I'm too afraid to count) of stamp sets I have. I love each set for a specific reason, but it never fails that the newer sets always see more ink than my older sets. That fact led me to a decision. Starting in February, I am going to make (at least) one card for each and every stamp set I own. A little clarification: I might use more than one stamp set on a card, but I will only "count" the set that is most prominent. Also, I am not planning to use every stamp in each set. For some sets that would easy and probably even natural. But for others, especially greeting sets, it wouldn't really be possible to use them all on one card, and if I had to make a card for each greeting in every set, why, I think that would have to become my life's work. As it is I'm not sure how long it will take me to complete this "little" challenge.

I'm not sure how many of the cards I will post here on my blog. I started out thinking I would share each one in a separate post, but then I realized that would probably be more blogging than I have time for. What I might do is try to post groups of them in themes: masculine, thank-you, clean and simple, etc. I'm actually looking forward to pulling out some of my "oldies but goodies" and finding out what new ideas I have for them!

If you have some poor, neglected stamps sitting around, I'd love for you to join in my little challenge. Thanks for stopping by!