Wednesday, September 30, 2009

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!

15 comments:

  1. Wow, what a fantastic space and love the way you are organized. Someday I hope to be that way too and for now I just use what I find and forget about what I didn't use or didn't know I had.

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  2. Would you like to come and visit me sometime? My craft area is half of my living room and is VERY disorganized. I'm envious of your skills.

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  3. Very nice. I knew you'd be uber-organized. Love the storage by color. :)

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  4. This is wonderful! I am in the middle of designing a very small craft space and you ideas have been so helpful! I love the colour storage. Now an idea I have tucked away in my brain,
    Hugs Judy xx

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  5. Thank you!! I loved seeing how you organize your supplies. I do something similar but it's scattered all over my room. Your bakers rack is perfect for putting it all together. Looking forward to your next post on your craft room.

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  6. I giggled when you called your space a 'dungeon' because I am still in the basement and that's whet I call my space...sad, really.
    You are super organized...I just lack space.
    Thanks for the sneak peek into your world.
    hugs,
    Karen D.

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  7. I love peeking into other stampers' creative places! I've often considered sorting my mountain of embellishments by color, but haven't had the nerve. I think you're pushing me closer to the edge of the diving board and I'm about ready to jump in! :)

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  8. I love that you sort all embellies by color. I do that with my ribbons; why has it not occured to me to do that with everything? Hmmmm...Thanks for getting me thinking.

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  9. I love how you organize your embellisments by colour! It's something I would definitely like to try out, not sure if I have the room for it! Thanks for sharing!

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  10. I'm just fascinated by the color organization method in the embellishment drawer. I've never thought of that and it's bubbling in the back of my head now.

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  11. now I want to go and organize my area...

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  12. Fab organisation Susan - you really live the CAS dream! I organise my papers and card by colour, but everything else is arranged by what it is eg buttons together, stamps together etc. I might have a re-think on that arrangement system now... Jo x

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  13. Wow, this looks great! I have most of my stuff organized by color. I have a few things that are a mix of a few colors (i.e. beads). I agonize on where they "belong"...

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  14. For all the posts I've jumped around and looked at, I never ran across this one before. I popped over from What Makes You Unhappy Pt. 1 because I too sort embellishments by color and like you, THAT WAS THE BEST THING I EVER DID. Truly, I make a card and think, "It needs a blue something here." However, unlike you I bought some bins that are a bit bigger than your bead ones and crammed only a small smattering of each color's embellishments into them (and then each bin has 2 colors). I love how you have a large 12x12 drawer to put all the stuff in, one color per drawer (although it appears orange and brown share and that's okay).

    I craft in my living room and sometimes I look around my living room and wish that it looked like adults lived in my home. I'll settle for it looking less hodge-podgey. And having better organization, that is just a bonus. Definitely I will be looking into what drawers I can change out be my embellishment drawers that can hold more stuff including things like glitter glue and bling.

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Thank you so much for taking time to comment!