Hello, and welcome to my website. When I started this site it was just to announce and display the card swaps I was hosting. Many of those swaps are still displayed in the GALLERY section. Over time I've moved away from swapping and the site is evolving to reflect that. I've scaled back on the gallery and I'm working on building up the resource areas by adding instructions, tips and templates. This is a small but growing part of my site.

One of the things I enjoy most is teaching. Sharing a couple of hours with a room full of stampers is a great way to spend an afternoon and it's hard to beat the feeling of accomplishment I get when my students learn a new skill and experience their own feeling of accomplishment. I've had the opportunity to teach at several different stamp stores and stamping events across the country. It's heartwarming to know that no matter where you travel you will always be able to find some of the finest people through your involvement with stamping.

There are two questions that I am asked all the time; "Why is your site named 'House of Stirfry'?" and "How did you get the name 'Chia'?" My daughter gets credit for naming the site. When I decided to purchase my own domain I knew it would be used for an assortment of things. Part of it would be for my stamping swaps, part would be to share family photos and news and yet another part would be used by my daughter for her personal site. With this in mind I wanted to select an eclectic name to reflect the overall nature of the site. My daughter had been using "House of Stirfry" as the name of her personal site at college and suggested we adopt it for "our" site. I think it was a very good idea.

To fill you in on the origin of my name I'll give you the story of my early stamping days. I started stamping in the mid to late 80's. I can't remember exactly when because it is a hobby that slowly grew on me. I know that in those days being a stamper was a very lonely pursuit. There were stories of actual stamping stores but they were rummored to exist only in California. The number of actual stamp companies could probably have been counted on your fingers. My sister introduced me to a new computer service called Prodigy and this opened a whole new world to me. I discovered there were other stampers I could share my hobby with! I soon discovered mail order stamp catalogs. They were free back then and I sent off for as many as I could find. My stamp collection started growing by leaps and bounds! It wasn't too long before Prodigy changed it's service/pricing policy and many of the stampers moved to another service called GEnie. I met some of the greatest stampers at GEnie. Some I'll never be able to forget; Stampo, BEE, Mudge and Stampcrazy to name just a few. During my time at GEnie stampers were really getting into the nickname craze. A few clever stampers found their own names and some of us had names bestowed upon us. My friends first tried to call me "Troll Momma" because I had drawn some trolls for one of the new stamp companies. Luckily that nickname gave way to "Chia Queen" in honor of a chia pet I'd drawn for the same company. (Did I mention that as popular as stamping nicknames were, ROYAL nicknames were even more popular?) Well, it took a few years but I finally managed to drop the "Queen" and was just going by "Chia" on-line. Over the years I met more and more of my on-line friends in person and the name "Chia" slowly worked it's way into my "real" life. It took my family a while to get use to taking phone calls for "Chia" but now it almost sounds normal.

I mentioned drawing some stamp designs. I have a fairly basic drawing style but it's produced some popular stamps along the way. You can see a few of my designs in the GALLERY section and along the left side of this page.

I love to surf the Web and look at photos of other stamper's workrooms. I've taken some pictures of my room to share with you. You can view them HERE.

Thanks for stopping by,
Chia