My Craft Space, Part Two

Shall we continue the tour of my craft space?

Certainly. Here's the right side of the space.

The baker's rack, which has served me well for eight years, houses a bunch of stuff. Across the top are jars of ribbon. Decorative, aren't they? Especially since I hardly ever use ribbon anymore.

Below the ribbon shelf are the green bins that house my Papertrey sets. I'm going to re-do the old tabs because the pink really stands out unattractively now in the new storage, but one thing at a time. These bins already look a little different because I purged about seven or eight sets to sell. That leaves more room for new sets. Yay!

On the bottom of the rack are four three-drawer 12x12 storage units. These hold a variety of tools, templates, envelopes, office supplies, pens (scrapbooking, mostly), spool ribbon, fabric, and fabric accessories.

The big, black bookshelf is new to my crafting space. I got rid of a LOT of books to free this up for crafting. The white photo boxes ($2 each at Michael's on sale) now house most of my wood-mounted stamps and Hero Arts clear sets, all of which used to be kept in four large plastic drawer units. I didn't like the mismatched drawer units, plus the stamps were exposed to light through the plastic, which may or may not have been good for them. The boxes protect the stamps from sunlight and are clearly labeled. Since they aren't stacked more than two high, it's easy to pull out what I need without a struggle.

The two light-green photo boxes hold cards that I've made to use (one box for Christmas, the other for everything else in my stash), and the blue box holds cards people have sent to me that have been retired from the cork board.

The big green basket holds a variety of interesting things that may or may not one day be used on cards, such as an out-of-date road atlas, some muslin I painted with shimmering paints, and die cuts friends have sent. There's another big green basket on top of the bookshelf to hold larger projects (such as teacher gifts at Christmas) when needed. I like using baskets to store projects in progress. It's just so tidy.

The binders used to house my stamp inventory, but that has become laughably out-of-date. Not sure if I'll ever bring it up to speed, so those binders will likely be repurposed. Obviously, the bottom shelves house craft books, magazines, catalogs, and notebooks.

 

Beside the bookshelf is another cork board (a girl can't have too many of these). It contains a Chinese glue brush for bookbinding (decorative), a colander for cleaning clear stamps (which doesn't fit anywhere else), a big metal ruler for cutting large sheets of paper or mat board, and some lovely things friends have sent.

The strip of paper across the bottom right is from my youngest son when he was in preschool. His teacher asked what he knew about dragons. "The dragon eats the princess," he replied.

Finally, here are two more plastic drawer units. The one on the left holds Christmas stamps and large alphabet sets. The one on the right is completely empty and will likely move to storage soon. Because there is so much light in this area, I cut some card stock to slide in front of the stamps to protect them a bit.

The small green baskets hold a variety of smaller projects, as well as finished cards that need to be put away/mailed to OWH/sent to someone.

If we take a look at the whole space again, you can see how the dominant colors are white (curtains, furniture, photo boxes, plastic drawer units), black (bookshelf, chair, picture frames), and splashes of happy green. The simplicity of the color scheme keeps the general effect of the space unified and clean...at least when it's all tidy!

The advantage to having such organized storage is that I can find everything AND I can put it all away quickly and easily when needed. Typically, I make a big ol' mess when working, but before starting a new card or project, I clean everything up. Order keeps the cleaning quick and easy, leaving more time for playing!

And there you have it. My craft space. Hopefully, you've seen an idea or two that will help you with your own organizational conundrums.