See the painfully slow progress as I am organizing my craft room!
My son has recently returned home after finishing university (what? how fast was that?!) and we have switched out his bedroom and my craft room….so I’m in the process of organizing my craft room. Well, to be truthful, I’m still in the process of unpacking and placing, so I’m trying to organize at the same time – so it’s painfully slow. (Plus I’m still running my Stampers Club, making projects and shooting videos and photos for classes and social media, so you can imagine how efficient I am right now….LOL).
My new craft room is smaller than my old one (don’t judge me, I delusionally thought that he wouldn’t be living at home full time again), so I’m also downsizing. My retired product garage sale a while back did help to free up some space, but there’s still so much stuff!
I used to store my dies in stamp cases, with magnetic sheets inside, which is fine if you’ve got room. I’m a visual person, so I need to see what is there (and there’s no way I’m relying on my memory these days LOL!)
For now, I’ve gone back to leaving them in their plastic sleeves; I add in a magnetic sheet if I have one, or if there was one in the case in which it used to be stored. I’m also using a rubber band to keep the stamp set and coordinating dies together (which also helps when I’m getting prepped for retired product sales, so I know what was bundled together!). I also use the labels to show the name of the dies in large print (because my eyes are not what they used to be), and how many dies are in the set (because I tend to take them out and leave them around).
This process has just begun, and since it’s a “working craft room”, it means that sometimes organizing my craft room is the last thing on the priority list… I do have some time off from my “other” job so I am hoping to get a bit more organizing done.
I recently finished the videos and projects for my Stampin’ Blends 101 Online Class so when I was putting my Blends markers away in the Blends Storage trays, I thought I would change how I stored them. I am a “Sort by Stampin’ Up! Colour Family and in Alphabetical Order” kind of girl, because I usually search for things by their name. For example, if I’m trying to coordinate ink/cardstock with a Designer Series Paper, I check which colours are used in the DSP (it’s on the backing sheet) and then I go grab those colours. For the Stampin’ Blends, when I’m colouring an image I often find I choose based on hue vs specific colours – “I need a green” vs “I need Old Olive” for example. So…..
I was so brave and did the ROYGBV thing! OK, OK, you’re probably thinking “what’s brave about that?” but for me, this is stretching the boundaries a bit. You can see my little labels on the caps (because I still need to know what colour it is LOL). I did have them originally sorted by Stampin’ Up! Colour Family and in Alpha Order (because I’m me…), but I actually found that putting them away took longer because I had to read the label, remember what Colour Family they were in, and then put them in the right spot alphabetically. (and then I would often wonder if I was putting them in the right spot and had to move them around). Sometimes being slightly obsessive about these things is not good….LOL. So rainbow order it is for now! I also tried to go paler shades to darker shades….
Have any good organizing tricks? Throw them my way! Perhaps at some point in time I’ll have the craft room organized (and cleaned) enough to do a room tour. Don’t hold your breath, though, that’s going to take a while!!! I think the Blends are the best organized thing in the room so far LOL.
