Well not all of us are married to wood working, shelf building, genius husbands. Heck, I'm not even married. So, if you haven't enslaved anyone yet, how do you organize an exploding scrapbooking supplies collection? Take heart. You don't have to be a carpenter to organize a craft room.
- First step, take stock of what you can get rid of. What craft materials have you not touched in 2, 5, 10 years? What's sellable on eBay? Pick an item, pretend you're the customer for your own item, and run a search for it on eBay. What price is it listed at? Next, add "completed auctions" to your search by checking that box. How much has your item sold for recently? Want to get rid of it fast? Sell it as a lot, with priority flat box rate for the shipping rate. Whatever fits in the box, goes, and goes fast. Also, search for your item on Amazon. If you find it, click "Sell yours here" and see if you want to list it on Amazon. Amazon doesn't charge listing fees; only if you sell do they make a commission, unlike eBay, which charges whether you sold it or not.
- Take a look around your house for vases, trays, containers, carry all bags, tins, and chests of various sizes. Also, designate a space to work on craft projects. Hopefully you can find a whole room to dedicate to crafting, but you can do alot with an alcove or closet near a sunny window. Don't have a room? Isn't it time your darling daughter left the house and went off to college? Kick her out on her ass. We're crafting here.
- Let me give you an example. I found a couple of old cookie tins, and now one holds all my embossing supplies, and the other holds all my adhesive refills. When I don't need it, they're up and out of the way, and, it being a tin, there is a lid, so I can stack bins on top of the tins if I need to.
- Go to the local library and ask the librarian how to find books on organizing a house. Check it out, take it home, and skim through the pages. When you find organization projects and techniques that interest you, read further, and jot down notes or tag it with sticky notes. For example, one library book I found suggested storing things like loose tea lights out of the bag in an extra vase. I loved this idea. Now my lovely white tea lights are a decorative element in my living room. A second project, I found some shelves in my garage that I had switched out for white at the last minute on a bathroom design. Instead of sitting in the garage unused, they now shelve my die cutting machines and cartridges. It got that huge Cricut off my craft table and up out of the way, giving me more room to work.
- Start dreaming. What would your craft space look like if it looked its best? Paper can go in a big chest. Adhesives and pens can go in colorful, paintable, sylish, promising pretty things you find around the house and kidnap back to your craft lair. Do you have anything you can make into a shelf? Do you have anything under the sink, shoved away in a cabinet or the garage, that can be recycled for the craft room? Wipe it off, wash it, run it through the dishwasher, shine it, polish it, paint it... so many things can be reworked to make a fab craft room. Also, where are you going to work? Does the area you picked already have a desk or table? No? Is there something around your house you can make into a craft table? If what you have is not big enough, you can add workspace with a glass or wood table top; be mindful of safety and how much weight the table base can hold without tipping. Add supportive legs if you need to; you can find them at Home Depot or Lowe's.
- Creating a color scheme for a room can be a daunting task. Go to IKEA and look around to see what's hot, or get a color wheel from the paint section at the hardware store. What are you favorite colors? What works together? Companies like Stampin' Up and Close to My Heart already group colors together into seasons, for example. There you go! A hint right there as to what colors go well together. Do you want your color scheme to fall within the color scheme of your whole house? Give it some thought. Oprah has a new Organize America campaign. On her website she has an Organization expert giving you tons of ideas for organizing your whole house. Decluttering and redecorating kind of go hand in hand. Spiritually, if your home is decluttered, your well being and soul feel decluttered. Organizing teaches the family that we value, or rather, take care with our things. We rule our things. They don't rule us. It's a whole new philosophy I want you to think about. Once you've tacked some simple jobs around the house, you'll have more vision for the craft room.
- My big chest... I bought a big dowry type chest from Pier One (on sale). I added hardware from Home Depot to the lid so it would stay open while my creative juices carefully picked out paper combinations. To the bottom bin I added two hanging folder systems from Office Depot. The metal frames for the filing system needed elevation, so I added a block of wood and some securing hardware from Home Depot. While I was at it, I added wheels to the bottom. Every girl should have a drill with built in screwdriver, and basic drill bits. Every girl should have a BOB, too, but that's a whole other article. Alright, so, I got my point across. You're the dominatrix, and the wooden chest is your submissive mate. Customize it to how you want it. Don't be afraid. Set aside a day to do it, get a cup of coffee, a nourishing breakfast, and go at it. You are the drill. Be one with the drill. Even the daintiest of girls can work a drill, and it gives a certain sense of accomplishment.
- On top of the chest I have a quality paper trimmer, the kind the University Art Department uses, with built in machete. I got it at Costco. It trims photos and scrapbook paper fast. I also have a crop tote I bought on sale at Michael's. I have extra scrapbook paper and most of my embellishments organized in it, plus my eyelet hammer. Makes a nice place to store all my buttons together and all those nifty things I pick up from Scrapbook Expo. Once the tote is full, I know I don't need anymore embellishements, and it keeps my spending from going crazy on these things.
- Folders... now that you have this chest coming together, don't forget folders. If Office Depot doesn't have 12 by 12 folders, Staples should. If the stores are out or don't carry it, try an internet search. Price three different stores and pick the cheapest. Try Cropper Hopper. They have a lot of organizing supplies and that's where I got my folders from, Cropper Hopper or a copycat. I labeled the folder tabs with a label maker. Hey, when you're going to organize, might as well orgasm.
- Alright, so that takes care of the paper. Next is rubber stamps. If you have been collecting for a few years, you probably, have, well, a buttload. If you're limited on space, you might wanna sell some of them. Before you do, think up. Get some sturdy bookshelves. Add 4 inch wide wooden slats to basket each shelf so stuff doesn't fall out, and paint the whole thing one of the key colors in your color palette. Add wheels to the bottom (I'm big on wheels!) so you can wheel it up to your craft table if you want to. Store your stamps rubber side down, on plastic or in plastic trays. (See my other guide on rubberstamp storage.) Organize your stamps by themes. Put the fonts together, the gardening theme together, and into other grouped themes, like holidays, Halloween, baby announcements, angels, fairies, castles, lighthouses, summer, fall, farm animals, zoo animals... You decide what themes work best for you.
- On top of the bookshelf I have a pretty wooden box from target and pretty tins saved over from the holidays filled with card envelopes, reinkers, and watercolor paints. I also have a big basket with trays from the 99 cent store where I organize my Close To My Heart markers.
- If you have a cutting machine like Cricut or Inspiration Creative Cutter, you can get it out of the way with shelves. Pick a spot in your craft room, but leave prime space by your craft table for the next project paragraph. Put the shelves in some other corner. All you need is two or three shelves, spaced 8.5 to 12 inches apart. I found what I needed at Home Depot, and for my Cricut, an 11 to 12 inch deep shelf is more than enough. Use anchoring hardware to secure shelves to the wall. My house is more than 50 years old, and simple shelves and hardware from the hardware store are holding up fine. On the top shelf, I have cutting mats and extra cutting mats. On the next shelf, I have Cricut cartridges and craft idea books. On the last shelf, one that is easy to reach, I have my Cricut and a bin with the markers and extra blades. This shelf also holds my roll of vinyl, some bins with little things for embellishments like photo corners, brackets, plastic gemstones, miniature pretend Christmas lights and googly eyes. I also have some juice glasses I don't dare use to drink from because they were a gift from my grandmother. For some reason I just can't drink from them and put them in the dishwasher, so I have one holding my new, clean, art brushes. That way it gets used, but not ruined. I found a cute little wooden box at a garage sale for my Cricut markers, which is great because I can store them parallel with the ground to optimize the ink. If I stored them up and down, ink would gravitate to the bottom.
- Craft table... A fine woman like yourself needs a fine place to work. Pick out a nice table and chairs and go with it. Or fix up an old table to make it larger, or longer, and recushion the chairs, to make them plush and comfy. An electric sander will do wonders to a table, and all you need is a staple gun with short staples for recushioning the chairs. Use heavy duty cloth or double or triple up thinner cloth. Places like Joan fabrics carry batting, or you can use some from an old pillow. There's wonderful fabric scraps and reupholster cushions to be had on eBay. On top of my craft table I have baskets from the dollar store for adhesives, favorite stamps and pads, and ribbon. At a garage sale I got a bunch of wooden boxes. They used to hold wine for shipping, now they hold my fine paper for scrapbooking. It makes a nice bin to put papers I'm working with now, for current page ideas. I also have an upright paper towel holder on my craft table, and a couple pretty Asian dishes to organize and clean whatever I'm working on at that moment, like embellishments or stamps. I'm sure you can find some pretty trays around your house or on a shopping trip. Don't go overboard. Get something cheap but durable. You could even try Goodwill or Salvation Army for some great deals.
- Reserve the wall nearest your craft table for a pretty organizer, the kind that usually goes on the back of the bedroom door for shoes or the bathroom door for grooming items. Target has some pretty ones fit for a craft room. Mount it on the wall by your craft table, and organize it with inspiring, colorful ribbon and embellishments. It also makes a nice place to put mementoes to scrapbook later, like your puppy's collar who passed away, or a cork from champagne from a favorite romantic evening. When you shop and open new packages, save a couple of the clear packaging trays to mount these momentoes inside your book. The champagne cork can be sliced with a knife to save the important words on the side and reduce the width of it so it will fit better in your book. Scrapbook companies are really good you'll notice about packaging their items in plastic trays that can be used like shadow boxes. You can also store whatever tools will fit; scissors, edgers, punches, exacto knife, adhesives, photo corners, foam circles, sticker letters, markers, and archival writing pens; anything you use short and sweet, quick but often. I also have wooden dowels or small diamter curtain rods for storing grosgrain, organza and jacquard ribbon. A stamp store near me uses short little shelves to stack ribbon by color, and more fibrous ribbon is stored in mason jars with large holes punched in the lid and reinforced with anti-snag rubber washers; the fluffy ribbon can be cut out a foot at a time, and jars of ribbon grouped by color schemes. This is the kind of ribbon that doesn't mind being wrinkled or tossed in a jar.
I hope this gives you a lot of ideas. If you're still at a loss, get some organizing books free from the public library, or get a few from the local bookstore like Borders or Barnes & Noble. You can also get a lot of ideas subscribing to Better Homes and Gardens for a year. You can borrow tools or invite friends with tools over for a meal in thanks for helping you with your project(s). Painting together is very bonding. Don't be afraid to ask for help. When recreating a room, two heads are better than one. And surprisingly, I've heard 20 to 30 something friends confess they were secretly happy to help me paint or woodwork, because it taught them how to do these things, and boosted their confidence about attacking projects in their own home.
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