Friday, September 25, 2015

Scrapbook Organization Spotlight - 3 storage solutions

While I'm not ready to share finished photos of my room yet - it's still a work in progress - I am ready to share three organizational solutions with you that I've decided on up to this point.

Like many of you, I have all kinds of dimensional letters that are not attached to a sticker sheet. I have felt and chipboard and acrylic. I have raw shapes and printed ones. For what seems like forever, I've kept those letters in their original packaging. That meant that it was kind of a pain to search for a particular letter in said packaging; it also meant that those packages took up a lot of space since they were in all shapes and sizes and varieties. When I started my scraproom renovation, I realized that a drawer I had been using on the wall to hold a variety of little things actually had enough slots to be my letter storage. One night, I sat on the couch and watched television as I sorted all of my chipboard items by letter. Each letter has its own slot; I also have slots for numbers 0-5 and numbers 6-9. I originally considered doing one number per slot, but I don't really have enough of them to justify that. Another handful of slots are devoted to punctuation - one slot for & signs, one slot for brackets, and one slot for everything else. I still have a handful of slots free and plan to use those for tags and labels once I'm ready to sort them. I may also include some iconic shapes in those sections like stars, hearts, and arrows. I'm not sure where this drawer will "live" in my room yet - maybe on the bookshelf, maybe on top of some paper drawers - but I'm super excited about the storage. I think this will help me use my chipboard letters and shapes more often, which is something I desperately need to do. Check it out:



Another problem area for me in my scrapbook studio has long been what to do with my punches. I don't have THAT many, but they are large and heavy and awkward to store. I've had them in baskets, but they were hard to see and not easy to access. I've had them in boxes in the closet, but I'd forget I even had them. I've had them stacked on shelves, but they had a tendency to fall over and crash loudly. I want to use my punches more, so I realized I needed to rethink how I was storing them. I was talking to Tracie about this problem - either irl or on the podcast or by messenger - and she suggested storing punches in the over the door shoe organizer that I'd bought to house some of my smaller items. What do you know? It works perfectly.  I'm still playing around a little bit with what I'll do with the bottom pockets that I don't need for punches. Right now, I've put my roller stamps there, but I'm not sure I like it. When it comes to that part of this storage approach, I'm reserving the right to change my mind in the next few days. Check out a pic:



I also have a problem storing my letter stickers. I've long been using a wooden box that started out as a good idea but quickly deteriorated into a hot mess. After looking at lots of ideas online, I've actually decided to stick with the current box I'm using. Here's what I'll do differently though.  Rather than storing some letter stickers horizontally and some vertically depending on size, I'm going to store all of them horizontally by color.  If the letter stickers are on a full size sheet, I'll either store those with the paper if it's one of my favorite brands (like OA or SS or JS), or I'll cut that sheet down to fit in the wooden box horizontally. I'm also working on a major purge of these stickers. Let's be honest: there are some styles or colors that I have that I will probably never use. For the letter stickers that I plan to keep, I will arrange them by color according to ROYGBIV. Here's what this storage solution looks like in progress; I'll show you the finished version next week:


What are your biggest storage problems? Have you discovered solutions for them yet? I'd love to hear about both!

3 comments:

  1. I love that first share of the wooden drawer. I have not come across my storage problems yet simply because my whole room is the problem right now. LOL I have started with paper and will be moving to embellishments next. Actually you know what I think that is my biggest problem. I will let you know if I come up with something profound.

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  2. I love that first tray you showed, but I'd never mix up my letters like that. In fact, I'm thinking of purging all my chipboard letters that aren't backed with adhesive - I never take time to use them. I am a Thickers girl and I store them horizontally in bins by color - smaller fonts in front, I store 12 x 12 sticker sheets of alphabets vertically in a basket and I store smaller alphabets horizontally in a basket. Would you believe it's the littlest alphabets that end up in the biggest mess! I know that sounds like they are spread out, but when I'm making up a kit, I know to do those three stops real quick.

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  3. You're making awesome progress!!! I adore that antique "box" in the first photo. What a find!

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