Stamp buyer, seller, reflect on hobby’s history

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By PEG STRAND
Thursday, April 12, 2007 2:42 PM CDT

Special to the Herald

Pharmacist Ida Simonson has what she calls an obsession — a 12-step rubber stamp collector’s obsession. For the past 18 years she’s built herself an army of 1,000-plus stamps that stuff her home. Her husband Dan knows all about them. He can’t help it. He trips over them.

LuAnn Hale is a stamp vendor. New product ideas tumble over themselves as she maintains her store, Stamp N Plus, at the City Mall, 16 W. Columbia St., Chippewa Falls. Her 28 years of stamping (and teaching stamping) experience continue to give her an itch to design more. She manufactures the products she needs, and somehow, the magic process involves her entire family.

These two women, the buyer and the seller, are destined to quench their stamp mania at the first ever Falls Stampede Expo on Saturday, April 14 at the Village of Lake Hallie Town Hall, 130th Street and 30th Avenue. Open to all, the event is set from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and is sponsored by Simonson’s beloved organization, Chapter BF, P.E.O. Sisterhood. The ticket price, $5 at the door, is used solely to raise scholarship money for area students.

The event is Simonson’s dream.

“I’ve wanted an event like this in the Chippewa Falls area for the past five years, ever since I’ve attended the Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee and Saynor stamping expos,” she said.

She feels Midwest Wisconsin is overdue (for an expo) and is co-chair of the event that will bring in 11 vendors from Chippewa Falls, Eau Claire, Manawa, Weston, Altoona, New Holstein, Medford and Stevens Point.

Simonson’s stamping frenzy began when, as a young mother, she’d take her kids and meet with friends from Ripon to attend craft fairs — the ONLY place to buy stamps and papers. The kids would sit and make gift tags while the mothers shopped. To this day, the same women gather for stamp-a-thon weekends.

“I always wanted to be an artist,” Simonson said.

Her mother said, “Art won’t feed you. Pick a career that will support you.”

To compromise, Ida chose pharmacy and used art as a hobby. She stamps away through every single TV program she’s watched, even through Packer football.

“I get immense pleasure grafting cards,” Simonson said.

She makes more than 200 per year, many of these for her co-workers at Group Health. She designs 80 cards for Christmas alone, not to mention other holidays.

The stamps that she owns are multi-purpose, and are mounted on wood blocks or are unmounted and stored in plastic CD cases. Most were obtained from family trips based around stamp stores, from Wisconsin to the coastlines, and even Strasburg, France.

Stamping a long way

When LuAnn Hale tried to emboss anything 28 years ago, she had only three colors from which to choose: gold, silver and clear. She remembers heating her projects over the toaster or the electric stove top. She carried and stored everything in a shoe box.

“Now I have a room full, and hundreds of colors,” she said.

Today, with lots of stamping tools and desire, she enjoys making “altered art,” taking anything commercial or old and changing it to something new. That could be jewelry, ornaments, clocks, record albums — “Not just cards,” she says.

With plenty of tools and storage, Hale has moved on to manufacturing stamps and products full time. In fact, she acquired a patent on her powdered chalks, developing some 48 colors, including five metallic. By using the chalks, she says, “customers can design their own backgrounds without buying patterned paper.”

Having three on-line retail Web sites (stampaffair.com, powderedchalk.com and stampinink.com) helps get her “stamps and chalk all over the world,” Hale said.

Her favorite is China, but other markets include England, Germany and Sweden. Her wholesale and commercial business is accomplished by attending various trade shows. She has written a rough draft of a book with tips and techniques for using her chalks.

“Once that’s out, the chalks will really sell,” she says confidently.

Coming to Chippewa Falls seven years ago from Racine, Hale opened her business in the basement of the Picket Fence. One year later she was housed in an upstairs location on Bridge Street. She continued to manufacture her stamp products, attend shows and run the business. Now located across from the Falls Bowls, she bought Stamp Affair and added it to her line. She’s dabbling in glue.

Hale’s entire family gets into the act at stamping expos. She says her husband Ron “is my right hand, my left hand, and sometimes both.”

Her son Brian, 30, of Racine, is a carpenter and helps her make blocks and spinners. Frank, 24, Al, 19, Sarah, 17, Roni, 7, and RJ, 5, all bottle and label the products at shows, run the cash register, demo and baby-sit.

She’d love it if, like stamping queens Carol Duvall (HGTV) and Sandi Genovese (DIY), she’d be noticed some day in her black and yellow outfits as she walks through a crowded room of stampers, and people would say, “There she goes!“

To be sure, she’ll have her plastic swim pool out at the Falls Stampede, full of rubber stamps that people can stand around and paw through for hours.

IF YOU GO

What: The Falls Stampede (rubber stamp expo)

Where: Village of Lake Hallie Town Hall, 13143 30th Ave., Chippewa Falls (about 1 miles northeast of Culver’s)

When: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, April 14

Tickets: $3 at Gordy’s County Market in advance, $5 at the door

Why: To raise money for local scholarships

Sponsored by: Chapter BF, P.E.O. Sisterhood

You’ll see: Demos, make ‘n’ takes, the latest in stamps, embellishments, inks and paper

Peg Strand, an incurable stamp devotee, is a freelance writer from Chippewa Falls.