Organization - my 2nd love ..............

I love crafting.  I love getting my hands dirty and sticky and finding the bits and pieces all over the floor.  Clean up isn't much fun but we're not talking about that tonight.  Since I've packed up all of my Spellbinders dies and the new Grand Calibur as well as my air compressor and Copic markers in preparation for tomorrow's class and demos I had to find something else creative to play with tonight.   So I turned to my 2nd love - organization.

How can you play with all of the wonderful goodies, embellishments, tools and  coloring methods if you can't find them??!  Almost 3 years ago we gutted my office and started over.  After some Ikea inspiration, drawn to scale plans and a couple of trips to pick everything up (one trip had me driving an hour home with the hatchback open!) we were set.   If you'd like to see the pics I've got them all, with captions, right here.  One of the best things that came from my reorganization is the sorting and labeling of EVERYTHING. 

Which is where tonight comes in.  Lately I've been on a stamp organization bender.  It's all Nichol Heady's fault at Papertrey Ink.  Their amazing stamp sets come with CD cases to store them in.  After my first couple of sets ALL of my stamps had to be reorganized this way.  It looks really cool underneath my ink too.  The most likely to be used sets are on the CD/DVD racks (Ikea of course) and the others are in the CD/DVD boxes (want to guess where those came from??).









Tonight I continued stamping the images that aren't kept in CD cases in my little stamp binder.   Love that I can just flip thru here to see all of my images. 

So tonight's creative lesson is: Create labels for all your stuff.  Because I've got labels on everything I know exactly where it's all at.  I don't have to see it all the time - which got VERY overwhelming after awhile.  By using the same products and printing the labels in the same size and font style I've made sure that everything looks coordinated and pulled together with very little effort.  And now I use my stuff more.  If I want to play with chalk, I know right where it's at.  If I'm in a chipboard or paper flower mood I can go right to them. 

One more creative tip: It's easier to organize at the BEGINNING of your acquisition period but don't let that stop you from doing it after you've acquired nearly 200 sets of something.  The time you'll save and the products you'll actually use are well worth the effort.  Even if it means you had to go to 3 different Staples and buy out the blank CD cases from 2 of them over a weekend to put your new system into place.  :)