kacyds' Wonderings, Ponderings, and Stampy Questions....

Yes I do.  I work for myself and my clients mail their payment to me.  If it wasn't for that, I would never see a modern stamp on cover, unless it was a Christmas card.

khj , From the looks of it, I’d say that kacyds  has decided to start moving on from Liberty Bell stamps to flag stamps anyway, so it’s probably not a big deal! Besides, he already has about 90% of the used Liberty Bell stamps that are out there! There for awhile, I actually thought that he might be trying to corner the market on them! 

And the post office wonders why they're having so many problems?

Don't know why, but I receive uncanceled stamps almost daily. . Received two of them today.

I see they didn't cancel the Forever Liberty Bell in the previous batch. See how thoughtful they are to provide you with unusual items for your Liberty Bell specialty/accumulation? Of course, with so many stamps left uncanceled, I guess it isn't as unusual anymore.

Yesterdays run to the mailbox with three uncanceled stamps.

That's a nice haul! I have received a grand total of five stamps in the mail since January but was recently given a huge plastic bin full of self-adhesives and am slowly going through them.

I just had a "soaking" session last night and removed about 200-300 self adhesives. My method is to clip the stamps so they have very short paper, soak them in 90% isopropyl alcohol, peel the stamps and put into another container of clean alcohol to dissolve remaining gum and then place onto a mat for drying. I use corn starch for any remaining stickiness and it seems to work well. A side effect of using IPA is that the cancels fade a lot which given the nature of heavy cancelling is heaven sent, especially with commemoratives which only make up 5-10% of the accumulation.

They are the most manually intensive and expensive stamps to remove from paper - alcohol is the cheapest solvent that works and it takes $2-3 worth per batch. My soaking session from a few days ago with traditional water-soluble stamps yielded about 1000 stamps for a quarter of the time.

And only one bell.