How to organize Rub On lettering tablets

August 13, 2007

I love, love, love rub on lettering. Let's just say it is one form of lettering I can master and usually looks great. In minutes, I can lay down a word wherever I want to on whatever surface I want to. I love that. I scrap F>A>S>T!! So rub ons are very useful tools for me. It didn't take me long to gain a collection of rub ons in the dozens of styles available.

But the question was how to store them so that I could also quickly find the letters and styles and colors I want? I mainly travel to crops with my Making Memories rub on lettering stack tablets. I had maybe 14 of them total and I used them weekly. Soon I had used up so many letters that all 14 packets were a mess. I never knew where I'd find an A, or a T, or a K when I needed it. Did I still have some "P's" left in this packet or in that packet?

I started by necessity to blend and mix up fonts for my title lettering. All the words then started to have a typography kind of style. My words had combined fonts just because I liked the look very much --and I had to improvise these partial stacks of rub ons.

Using up what I had was not the problem. Finding a letter when I wanted one was the problem! What to do to organize this pile of rub on stacks? I hated flipping thru 14 booklets just to find one good "S" or a couple of zeros for a year date. Finally, it struck me to take apart all the little stack tablets of MM rub ons and re-assemble them into ONE gigantic black stack and one gigantic red stack and one gigantic white stack. Genius. Every now and then I scare myself with a plain and simple good idea.

Here is my daughter helping me sort our rub on letters. Within the black color family of rub ons, we put all the A's together and all the B's together and all the C's together and on down the line. Then we made one giant stack. Starting with the Z's we put them back in reverse order on the post. We used a post album post extender screw extension to stack them all back together with A's on top and Z's on bottom. You can put your numbers back on tha tpost after the Z's or before the A's--wherever you prefer.

Here is what the new BIG stack looks like all fanned out with many styles of black rub on letters and numbers all in one convienient place. One stack. One color. One long post!

Now I can find what I want in a flash. There is only one stack to look through for each color of rub on. I can determine my labeling or titles, see if I have all the letters, and create the item quickly. I am so glad I streamlined my stash of rub on stacks! Watch out, I am labeling everything with them now! :)