For over 20 years I have been buying collections large and small from Scouters that were ready to get out of the hobby or just needed to pass their stuff on. Inevitably I would end up with dozens of plastic vinyl or poly pages that these items were stored in. I don't know if it was the old Ecology Director in me or not but I just could not force myself to dispose of these pages. For years and years I accumulated them (sometimes tried to give some away) until they eventually filled a half dozen banker boxes.
Once I settled into my new warehouse outside Charlotte, NC it was time to do something about these pages. So for about the first 6 months that remained a card on my project board. But recently I spent several days sorting out these pages by manufacturer, size and condition. Some of these I have in a giveaway box that I will take to future Scouting events to share with youth collectors just getting started. Others I could easily use as part of my Trade-O-Ree set up in order to sell items. But what I needed was a heavy duty card so that the patches could look good in the page and give me a back-to-back way to utilize space. When I looked around I quickly discovered that there was nothing on the shelf that was cut the right size. So I decided to manufacture my own blank cards using the familiar 110 pound grey card stock that Best Hobby Pages is known for.
I created the cards for the common pages that I had 6-pocket Scout, 6-pocket square, 4-pocket and 2-pocket. Most everything that I will put out at a TOR could fit in those sizes of pages. I use catalog racks instead of notebooks at shows. This means my items are already standing up at an angle so having top loading pages wasn't going to be an issue like it sometimes is when you have albums laying on a table. Patches tend to find a way to slide out the top in that set up. The other huge stash of recycled items that I wanted to use was the old Brush Creek Trading Company (now called PPS) envelopes. Since many collections in the 1990s were stored in these over the years I have accumulated maybe a thousand of each size. So going with the same idea I've manufactured a card that can be used in the popular 2-pocket and 3-pocket envelopes from back in the day.
Although I made all of these cards for my own personal use it made sense to order them in such quantities that I could also offer them for sale on the website. I know that when I go to TORs many people are using generic pages and probably many collectors at home are too.
The other perk was that the Blank 6-Pocket Scout Card is actually designed to fit the Best Hobby Pages 6-Pocket Scout Clear Page. This was something that I always thought made sense to offer and now it's a reality.
When you look for these cards on the website they will say "Blank Card" to let you know that they are from this series. The red text reminds you that they are not designed to fit in the regular Best Hobby Pages envelopes or pages. Most are just enough off that it won't work.
