I’m guilty of having several collections and I just decided to start a new one (shhh – don’t tell my husband!). If you’re a collector, you probably have some interesting stories about how your collections started.

Some collections are inherited. That’s how I became interested in Depression glass. My grandmother collected it and I inherited a lot of it from her. I add a few pieces now and then.

Some collections are gifts. My grandmother started buying me bone china teacups when I was just a child. I’ve honed that collection to be teacups that represent holidays or seasons.

Some collections just start themselves. You realize you have several items that go together. Display them together and they become a collection. This is how we began buying paintings on our trips. Over the years I had purchased a couple just because I liked them. I realized they were a very nice thing to have and a lovely way to remember the trips. Now we try to buy one special painting that depicts the landscape on each trip we take (although we are about to run out of wall space, so I’m not sure if this collection will hit a dead end soon!).  Something similar happened with my sheep collection. I have one sheep I bought as a child in Maine. I stumbled on one in Montreal years ago that I loved and realized if I dug out the original Maine sheep, it was the start of a collection.

Many of my collections begin when I find something I really like. I always ask “What am I going to do with this?” when deciding whether to buy something. I had a moment like this recently when we spent a long weekend in the Adirondacks. In a tiny shop in Keene Valley, I found a vintage-style tea towel with an illustrated map of the Adirondacks. I’ve been hooked on the vintage style map ever since seeing a set of drinking glasses with a vintage map of Yellowstone that I didn’t buy this past summer. I saw this tea towel and fell in love with it, but I asked myself “What am I going to do with this?” I hit on the idea of building a collection of these and using them as quirky dinner napkins. I bought the towel and am now on the hunt for others from other locations we have visited. And thus a collection is born.

Sometimes you start a collection and it peters out. I’ve had a couple of failed collections. I had a few pieces of artisan made glass fruit. I realized after a while that I didn’t really like it. The same thing happened with fortune cookies. I started a collection of some metal ones. They were hard to find and they are all pretty similar, so that collection went to the back of the closet, at least for now. I inherited teaspoons that my grandmother collected on her travels. I’m just not a fan of those, so my mom took them.

How did your collections start?