hello!! i know i’m v new here, but i wanted to share where i’m at with my collection. i’m not new to collecting (ask me how it feels moving my record collection to a new apartment year after year 
), or to curation (collaging supplies aren’t easy to transport either ), but this is my first time interacting with my pokemon cards in 20-odd years. i’ll put some personal history in a little collapsible which you are welcome to skip if you’d like!
yapping about myself 😴
calling myself a 90s kid is stolen valor considering i was only alive for the latter half of the decade, but i had older siblings and was around older kids enough that i think i’m spiritually a millenial, and early pokemon hooked me immediately. i only ever saw maybe 5 episodes of indigo league, always at other people’s houses since my mom didn’t like it. but she let us have the cards, and i would pore over them before i could even fully read them. i also fell in love with the old pokemon figures (the collection was discovered probably 10 years ago and promptly given to my nephew but i may be able to get some pics eventually).
i would trace the pictures in the old 151+1 pokedex book and hang them on my bulletin board, alongside cards i especially loved. the rest of my cards were in one of those old snorlax wotc binders that i got at a garage sale, or in a shoebox that i covered in stickers (usually those shiny japanese sticker cards but also one inexplicable honey bucket brand sticker 
). i loved getting the prebuilt decks despite never actually learning how to play the game itself, which means my childhood collection is teeming with many multiples of the same card lol since i never understood that the prebuilt decks always had the exact same cards. at some point my cousin gave me his old copy of pokemon crystal, and i was even more hooked than before.
sadly around fourth grade or so i became hyper aware of how most of the girls didn’t actually care about pokemon, and little sheep that i was i hid away my shoebox, set down my gameboy, and threw away my pictures. although of course i grew up and realized it was silly to base my interests on what everyone else cared about, i never got back into modern pokemon cards or games. but i still love playing crystal, and it was a delight to rediscover the box and the binder and to rekindle my love of the cards 
end autobiography section!!
pictured: the author’s only friends in the world
i’ve learned a lot in my short time on the fourum, both from the species collectors and general collectors, and it’s helped me shape my goals. i don’t wanna put more plastic into the world and separate myself from the cardboard; the tactile sense of them is rlly important (just one woman’s opinion 
). so no slabs. that also means nothing too too valuable, as i don’t want anything so precious that i’m afraid to take it out and hold it. binder collections, on the other hand, especially with the personal touches (michi?), have me in a chokehold!! it’s like collaging, in a way, and i love it. so that’s where i’ll be focusing.
right now i have two projects, which i painstakingly laid out in an excel sheet with images clipped in before realizing there were websites built for that exact purpose lmao.
crindy’s current projects:
- binder dedicated to wotc gen 1
- binder dedicated to wooper and quagsire
when #1 is crossed off i want to do the same for gen 2 but i’m trying to limit myself lol. in the meantime i moved all of my old gen 2/3 cards to an auxiliary binder for uncurated safekeeping.
i think this journal format lets only me respond to myself, so i’m gonna lay out the collections in subsequent posts
And your Woop/Quag binder is looking great too! Reminds me of all the cards I still need to pick up. Can’t wait for more updates!