Books and musical instruments and books regarding musical instruments (have too many tutorials). Obviously I have WhOA really bad, and I also have a mando, an octave mando, flutes (yes, the Boehm kind and a cool Native American flute), recorders 
, a fife, a keyboard, and a few guitars. I like folk instruments, and the Boehm flute and piano were instruments I learned as a child and still like.
I never get bored though!
I have a bunch of turtle figurines, stuffed animals and art, including two that were sculpted by my older son, one carved from wood and one permanently inked on my back. I only collect instruments that I actually play, which means less than 20 whistles and a smaller, but really excellent, collection of fifes.
I didn’t think of instruments as a ‘collection’, right away, so here</a](http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=8315&start=105">here</a)> is mine.
Quote @ Sara
I just wanted to say, I really dig your avatar - very cool!
I like yours, too. 
Thank you!!
Shewt…I thought I was done, but you people reminded me of the little collections…um, rubber stamps (primarily botanicals) and frogs…two very specific mini-collections, one outdoor collection of froggy garden figurines (hiding amid the hostae) and one indoor collection of paired froggies. . .um. . .caught in the act.
Objects:
Antique books. Scarves, shawls, and wraps. Beads.
Thoughts:
Quotations and versions of my favourite ballads.
I love hostas, especially when they’re all bunched together, under a tree.
Speaking of plants, I have a wandering](http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_Jew_%28plant%29%22%3Ewandering) jew plant on the porch that’s ‘collected’ itself beyond hope this summer (it’s at least a few feet long, started out as a couple of inches). I’m going to cut most of it away, but if anybody here wants some just PM me and I’ll give it to you for free. It’s sending roots everywhere. Grows super easy and super fast.
I collect clones of native edible, useful and just interesting fungal fruiting bodies (mushrooms). I have most of the clones in the fridge growing on cornmeal agar. I also have the equipment to go with that hobby, so I also collect microbiological equipment including a 50-gallon pressure cooker to autoclave stuff in and numerous mason jars to make mushroom spawn in. I even made my own small propane burner from aquarium and gas line fittings, an aquarium pump and an oilcan to flame sterilize microbiology tools as I inoculate petri dishes and other culture containers.
Rod
Oh boy, don’t EVEN talk to my husband, he keeps going on about growing morels in our basement…
:roll:
Robin
Good Evening:
Well…
I collect old cameras and musical instruments. I think I have way to many of them that my time allows to play them.
My wife collects cooking books.
Luis
Oh boy, don’t EVEN talk to my husband, he keeps going on about growing morels in our basement…
Thats Luck of the Irish. You are lucky he doesnt find out about the Garden Giant “King Stropharia”. Imagine you garden taken over by 2ft tall 40" round Mushrooms…
On a serious note, I am surprised that nobody mentioned collecting weird gross lingerie that fell out of peoples ceilings (like the one on Ebay recently) 
Scottish terriers (real and replicas)
Old clocks
Books
Folk instruments I can’t play
Husbands
This is an interesting thread for me since I have never been a collector. I would be interested in speculation about the difference between collecting and non-collecting personalities. In the thirty years that I played guitar I never had more than two guitars at a time, my main one and a backup. I have a bunch of whistles now but only because I’m a relatively new whistler and I am still sorting out what kind of whistle sound I like. Part of the reason I am not a collector is that I am a bit of a miser. I can’t bring myself to buy things that I have no practical use for. Eventually I will give away all the cheap whistles I have that I never play.
So why do you collect or why do you not collect?
Mike
I’m not a collector by nature either. I’d bought so many whistles because they were cheap and because I was looking for ones I like and experimenting. I sold two of my guitars since I didn’t need that many, so I will get rid of things I no longer use and that I can find a good home for. Now that I have some whistles I love, I won’t be buying them nearly as often. As for the other instruments, I do play when I get time. I only have one mando and one octave mando. The Native American flute was more art as I can smell the cedar, love to look at it, and it was handmade, and that’s the only one I have. The tutorials are along the same lines, looking for the right one(s) for me. Whistles and tutorials are mostly mail ordered, so I don’t have the chance to try them before I buy.
So I don’t really have a collector personality as such; I just get interested in something and try different things out. I have the personality that can’t stick to just one instrument or book, I like different qualities in them, such as whistle sounds and have them in many keys as well.
I guess I have the personality that will amass some instruments, try them out, then pare down the stock. Don’t know if there’s a name for that.
I’m not intimately familiar with this Ebay story but it reminds me of an apartment we lived in once. There was a hole in the ceiling where we could see straight up into the upstairs apartments kitchen. These people generated some pretty rank odors up there, not just from food, so we stuffed some of my hubby’s old underwear up the hole. This fixed the problem, but I wonder if it was ever discovered by subsequent tenants!!!
Robin
If you’re at all handy with wood, one great use for wine corks is trivets. We have some my father-in-law (the family wine collector) has made…they’re basically six-inch square wooden trays with the corks inlaid in a pattern on the top to make a heat-resistant surface. They’re pretty, and great conversation pieces.
Redwolf
If I were you I’d hang onto them, Robin.
With Global Warming coming along nicely you may need to fashion them into an ark.
I am a collector of hummingbirds. Not the live ones, although I do feed them all summer while they are here. I even had a friend’s father carve walnut hummingbird sound holes for my Hammered Dulcimer.
I collect them because they are pretty and it makes me happy to look at them.
I also collect music boxes. I lost my 1st collection 12 years ago when our house burned down so it isn’t a very large collecion now. Most of the new ones I have gotten are hummingbird music boxes.
My husband collects O gauge trains and books about the civil war.
We had an exchange student from Germany who couldn’t understand what this collecting thing was all about. She said that they only keep family heirlooms. But she did sneek home a shell from a very large snapping turtle in her luggage when she left. I guess that was more like a souvenier than a collectable.
Cheers,
Kathy
To be honest, I’ve never really thought of myself as a collector either. With books, the reason I have so many is, well, I read. A lot. And I don’t like to get rid of them (unless I’ve got one that’s really cheesy) because I know I’ll want to read them again. Years ago, when we first moved from Pacific Grove to Durham, I gave away huge bags full of paperback books, reasoning that, if I wanted to read them again, I could just pick up new copies or get them at the library. Unfortunately, I found that many of the books I wanted to re-read were out of print (which was most of them, at one time or another), and not available at our local library (and, in those days before Amazon.com, the odds of finding a copy of an obscure out-of-print paperback were pretty slim…even with haunting used bookstores , there were many I never was able to replace. In some cases, I couldn’t even remember the title…only the plot and maybe a bit about the cover…which made replacing them even harder). Now, if I read a book and enjoy it, I just keep it. It means my study gets awfully cluttered, and I periodically have to take everything off the shelves and reorganize so I can find things, but on the upside, I never lack for something to read! All I have to do is browse the backs of my shelves, and I’m sure to find something I haven’t read in a couple of years that sounds like fun again.
Redwolf
Military history books.