Craft Room, Part 1

My craft room is a small bedroom, which is a huge improvement over the unfinished basement where I did my crafting when we first moved to this house. I called my basement space the Dungeon. The upstairs bedroom, however, has soft lavender paint on the walls, sheer white curtains, and a noticeable lack of spiders. Much better.

Today, we'll focus on paper and embellishment storage, which centers around a baker's rack loaded with plastic storage:



The top shelf contains my 8.5 x 11 paper, which is mostly StampinUp and Papertrey. There are also five Cropper Hopper 7 x 12 accordion storage folders that hold stickers, alpha stickers, dp scraps, and cardstock scraps.



The second shelf (cut off in the photo) holds my stamp inventories, in those pretty pink, brown, and green binders. The Create binder is mainly scrapbooking ideas (haven't opened it in months, sadly), and the others are photo albums and a scrapbook. The drawers on this shelf hold cutting tools, transparencies, waxed paper, and other miscellaneous stuff.

The third shelf holds patterned paper sorted by theme and color and brand in a complicated system that works for me in the small Cropper Hopper holders. Cardstock is in the larger holders, sorted by smooth/textured and arranged by color.



The bottom section holds four 3-drawer, 12 x 12 sterilite drawer units that represent the most brilliant organization strategy I've ever used. All my embellisments (except ribbon) are in these drawers, sorted by COLOR.



Here's the blue drawer. Isn't that beautiful? Everything that's blue is here: glitter, flock, flowers, brads, buttons, stickles, thread, whatever. I use a combination of bead storage boxes and other containers to sort everything neatly.



There are drawers for the six rainbow colors, metallic embellishments, and neutrals (white, black, brown, cream). Chipboard gets its own drawer since I can make it any color I want.

Here's the Metallic drawer. The containers holding things are bead storage boxes. I like this better than the tins that Hodgepodge came in because I can see things more easily. Of course, I hardly ever use this stuff anyway. But hey, I will...one day.



Sorting by color was scary at first, but I've been a long-time fan of Stacy Julian, the founding editor of the sadly defunct Simple Scrapbooks magazine. She swears by her own color storage system, and I felt like I wasn't using my stuff like I could, and I would forget I had things until after I made pages or cards and would say, "Oh, this would have been perfect!"

I don't say that any more. Everything is easy to find, easy to coordinate, and easy to see at a glance.

Over the next few weeks, I'll show more of my space. But tomorrow, I'm getting back to cards. And on Friday...a purge give-away, as promised!