Curating My Card Collection
A while back I shared that I had let my Christmas card collection get out of hand. I needed to curate it and upgrade the storage. So how did I curate my collection?
So I determined my goals:
Save cards from my family as keepsakes.
Eliminate cards that did not fit my design aestheic.
I started by dividing my cards into three categories: from family, from friends, and from businesses.
For the family category further curation happened rather quickly. I organized them based on who they were from. I then checked to see if any of the cards were duplicate designs. If there where I checked to see if one card had more of a message in it and if so I kept it over the other. There were very few cards from this category I let go of. If I had been more interested in culling these cards I could have scanned the cards/messages in order to keep digital copies and let go of the physical cards. Stand out cards I kept were the ones from my grandparents and my husband’s as well because they are no longer with us.
The business category was quick to go through as well. There were few cards in it and I basically asked myself if I would want to decorate with them and again eliminate duplicates. For me some of the standouts I kept were from our veterinarian as they feature adorable animals enjoying the holidays and the cards from a design company my husband has worked with and we’ve become personal friends of the owner.
That left the last category: those from friends. I started by sorting them from who they were from. Again I looked for designs that might be duplicates and eliminated those. I then eliminated the ones that I wouldn’t decorate with.
The result was probably cutting my collection by a third (the two right piles) which makes it more manageable. I’m in the process of ordering an archival box for the cards from my family (the pile on the left) and I have an amount of cards in my decoration collection (the middle piles) that are easier to store. Some cards that stand out in my mind are ones that are from high school friends as you can see their sense of taste change over the years. And then there are ones from a friend of ours who is a pilot, his cards all have a flying motif to them and I love that because when I see them used in decor around my house I always know instantly which cards are from him and his family!