Many stamp collectors started their collections with pre-printed albums. You could buy them rather cheap at the start but had to pay a lot later on when purchasing suplementary sheets every year. Once I got my first computor I started to experiment to make my own album sheets. That could´nt be too difficult I thought. And it wasn´t. Just drawing a number of squares and placing them where you wanted them to be. This can be done with any simple program on your computor. I use Powerpoint.
This is just one example how a page could look like.
Start up by creating a frame around the sheet and save the same to be used for all other pages in your album. You also can save some of the squares since many stamps from most countries appear in repeated sizes.
As a next step you can print a title for every series or single stamp and below in somewhat smaller letters a subtitle. Here the names of birds. This makes it easy to place the right stamp into the right place if you don´t want to print the catalogue number into each square. If you have a special story to tell about one or another stamp, why not put it down in writing. Historical events, anniversaries, famous pleople…. you name it.
To give every page your personal touch depends on your own imagination and creativity. In case you have programs for treating fotos in your PC you could preferably decorate some of your pages with pictures. Below some examples of my pages
At last some practical hints:
In order to draw the different frames around the stamps ,you must experiment with the size of your page. Once you have zoomed in the correct size all on your screen will correspond with the printed page. This conformity is depending on which printer you are using. (in my case size 75%) This enables you also to compare the size of the frame with the actual stamp when holding it against the screen. Can be timesaving.
Start up by creating a frame around the sheet and save the same to be used for all other pages in your album. You also can save some of the squares since many stamps from most countries appear in repeated sizes.
As a next step you can print a title for every series or single stamp and below in somewhat smaller letters a subtitle. Here the names of birds. This makes it easy to place the right stamp into the right place if you don´t want to print the catalogue number into each square. If you have a special story to tell about one or another stamp, why not put it down in writing. Historical events, anniversaries, famous pleople…. you name it.
To give every page your personal touch depends on your own imagination and creativity. In case you have programs for treating fotos in your PC you could preferably decorate some of your pages with pictures. Below some examples of my pages
here some details
If you have read previous advises you probably also noticed that I did not follow my own intensions.Here I was a bit lazy and did not enter any subtitles under the herbs as I did with the series "snowwhite animals"
In order to draw the different frames around the stamps ,you must experiment with the size of your page. Once you have zoomed in the correct size all on your screen will correspond with the printed page. This conformity is depending on which printer you are using. (in my case size 75%) This enables you also to compare the size of the frame with the actual stamp when holding it against the screen. Can be timesaving.
Number your pages starting with year followed by serial numbers. This helps a lot to locate any stamp later on amoung all your pages. Here some pages from Sweden year 2012
wow, it need a lot of time and patience, good job :)
SvaraRadera