Over the past few weeks, I've been picking away at some changes in my craft area. While my space has always been organized, it has never been inspirational to me. Rather, it was a mix of unattractive storage with no real theme.
I finally decided that it was time for a change, so I bought Target cubes and transferred many of my supplies to canvas bins which fit inside the spaces.
It has taken me some time to figure out how best to use the canvas bins. They're deep and I didn't want to just throw items into them. So I found small containers to fit inside the bins so as to use the space efficiently. I have found that I can now store a lot of supplies in a very small amount of space!
For the past few weeks, the bins haven't been labeled -- and that was driving me crazy! I finally got that done and now it's much easier to find things. I made tags in Word by creating text boxes with white text, filled with black.
I wanted the white text to show as cream, so I printed them onto cream cardstock. Then, because I am changing the metal in my craft area to brushed nickle, I decided to hang the tags with ball chains to match. I have a large stash of ball chains. One can never have too many!
After making a test set of the tags, I decided that they would need to be laminated in order to keep them from tearing over time. Then I remembered that I had a package of plastic badge holders which would be perfect for my tags. I adjusted the sizes a tiny bit, printed a final set, and slipped them into the badge holders.
This made me ridiculously excited!
Here's a peek inside the bins, so you can see how I organized the space. All of these stacking containers fit down inside the canvas bin labeled "INK".
There is plenty of room for my ink pads, Distress Inks/handles, and Cat's Eye Chalk. In my old storage system, it took 2 large drawers to hold all of these items.
All of my card making supplies fit into one canvas tote. In my old system, these same supplies were spread over 3 very large drawers.
These stacking containers snap together and hold my envelopes and card bases. A separate container fits in the bin and holds card-making embellishments.
I have a separate bin for embellishments. This is the only area I'm not completely happy with. For the past couple of years I have stored my embellishments by color in small drawers. I love the color organization, but I didn't love the drawers. I've spilled the contents more times than I can count! I wanted to find small containers that would fit into the bin and allow me to store my small tins of brads and such without spilling them.
After considerable searching, I finally settled on these small containers from Office Depot. They are deep enough to hold a lot of embellishments and fit nicely in the canvas bin. In fact, I combined some colors (red/orange/yellow) since I don't use much in that color range. Unfortunately I found that in pulling out the bins, I STILL spilled brads and buttons -- in fact, even more so than with the drawers.
So I converted BACK to this system which I used a few years ago and put all of the tins back in their containers. (I never stopped using the little tins -- I just moved them back into the metal boxes they came in.) I really do love this storage system. The only thing that bothers me is that my brads and buttons are no longer with the rest of the embellishments. But it's certainly better than spilling them all the time!
I'm very pleased with how compactly my paints and other colorants now fit into a single bin. In my old system of plastic drawers, these supplies were scattered and took up far too much space. Now everything fits neatly in one bin.
My space is a work in progress, but I'm already much, much happier with how it looks and functions!
