CRAFT ROOM STORAGE

The craft room (aka "The Craft Room") used to be a bedroom and thus it came equipped with a double wardrobe with glass doors.

Marvin has filled the space with shelves and made wooden boxes (around 100 - you can only see half of them here) to fit on them.

As most of my stuff was in shoe boxes the smaller ones are large shoebox size, making it easier to simply transfer the contents.

The larger boxes are the same height but are based on the size of an A4 display book so that I can store full sheets of paper "as is" or sort my scraps out into plastic storage sleeves and put them into the boxes.

Once again I've gone with boxes rather than drawers so that I can pull the required one(s) out  and use the contents directly from the box.

Marvin has screwed a little metal label holder to the front of each box and and used a forstener bit to drill a semi-circle at the top for an easy grip.

I hand-wrote labels for each of them but to be honest, the phrase "its in the MDF box" has already become synonymous with "we have no idea where that is" in our household.  If I don't get the hang of finding things quickly soon, then I'll add some pictures - I think a little die-cut pair of scissors might make the scissor box easier to locate that the carefully written label or, as Marvin suggests I draw up a plan with easier-to-read listing co ordinates.  Its only been a few days (I'm doing all these posts re: the craft room at the same time but posting them weekly) so I'm hoping I'll just organize them according to what I use most frequently and then just remember, so I don't have to read too many labels to find what I'm after.

WOODEN STAMP STORAGE

Shelves for stamps and little bits.

I'm doing a series of posts about my craft room reno.  Hopefully you'll get some inspiration.  Sometimes seeing what someone else has done can provide an idea to follow (feel free if this is you) or a clearer idea of what you do want if you see something you don't like.

Here is what we came up with for the storage of the rubber stamps.  (Sorry Marvin, "the solution up with which we have come"......Really??!!)
 
From sad experience I know that it's best not to stack stamps, its certainly not good to squash them, or even store them face down for long periods plus the rubber is not particularly happy in the sunshine.

Marvin made these shelves a while ago, and we relocated them to the new room.  they spacing of the shelves has been dictated by the range of sizes of the stamps.

Its a bit of a hard call, because in some ways it would be nice to have all the same type fo stamps (e.g. Christmas) together, but the trade off is that larger spaces would be needed between all the shelves, hence less space overall.

The bottom of the shelves have been cut to fit over the skirting boards and the unit screwed to the wall, which means that it can be removed fairly easily, but that it won't fall over either.

There's space at the bottom for storage of other smaller items such as embossing powders and glitter glue, although perhaps one day all the shelves are filled with stamps!

I put all the really little stamps in large jars on top of the bookshelves at the side.  It only takes a moment to gently tip them onto the desktop, although a little longer to find the stamp.  I'll put them on the shelves if this proves to be a problem.

By putting the stamps on the shelves on an angle, I can see the front pattern but more will fit.  It was only after I'd finished that I realized that I should have angled them AWAY from the window. D'oh!!

EMBOSSING FOLDER STORAGE

I've never been entirely happy with the way my embossing folders have been stored - thus far in a series of shoe boxes followed by wooden boxes made for the purpose.  The latter were fine, but always looked a bit messy.

Marvin (my husband, but not his real name) built this great storage unit - the boxes are based on the largest size of embossing folder, and lift out so that if I'm working with them I can just take them out, sit them on the desk and rummage.  Even although I have quite a collection it certainly doesn't fill up all the boxes.  The others have been used to store cards that I've made, my little collection of cards I wish I'd made, and blank cards ready to be decorated.

Marvin thought it would be a good idea to add labels to make things easy to find, and knobs to make the boxes easier to remove.  He is absolutely right except that I just love the plain white faces of the boxes "as is".  We can always add them on afterwards if it proves to be an issue.

 I still have quite a few of the small Cuttlebug folders as well as several border folders, that need a little bit of containment before being stored.  I found that the small folders fitted perfectly inside a business card folder - these are usually available from discount stores at a very reasonable price - I think mine was about $2.00.  I tried a variety of things with the border folders before settling on a 6 x 4 top opening pocket photo album (another $2.00 investment).  The folders wanted to slip around and slide together.  Marvin suggested placing a split pin at the top of the page between the folders and this worked brilliantly!!

Oh, and if you're wondering, the big vase in the floor is going to be for all those awkward rolls of brown paper etc. that just won't fit in the cupboard....once I find where I put them because I couldn't find anywhere in my old room!

A Work in Progess

Small folder storage

Storage for Embossing folders and cards

CUT STRIP BACKGROUND

CUT STRIPS

COMPLETED BACKGROUND

This easy background is a simple way to use up leftover papers.

I used a dark brown background card.  The papers were cut at an angle....just somewhat randomly, an then stuck them side by side with a little gap between.

Then the layers were sliced vertically and reassembled, alternating top and bottom, and leaving a similar sized gap.

I've used "outback" colours with a bit of copper shimmer to lift it, but I think if you used a black base and primaries you'd get a very sixties look which could be fun.

CRAFT ROOM RENO

My craftroom had sort of grown organically over time.  It had green walls and well-worn pink carpet. There were plastic boxes, and cardboard boxes and an assortment of plastic bags, unrestrained piles of paper and....well...you get the picture.  After spending a number of evenings drooling over other people's creative spaces as shown on various sites, my husband, good bloke that he is, suggested we could do something similar....in fact.... as he enjoys woodwork, more or less whatever I wanted.

Lucky me.....yay.....followed by sudden panic.  What did I want?  Well,  I wanted to be able to store the same sorts of things together for starters.  I wanted to be able to find them too, and then access them easily!  I also wanted to be able to work either sitting down or standing up. Most of all, I wanted a comfortable, usable space - not cluttered, but not so pristine that I was afraid to throw a bit of paint around.

Well.....a few weeks later, and as of yesterday (today if you count cleaning up) we're finished!  I was going to say that I'm not posting this as a "look what we did!" but have to confess there's a bit of that - I wish I'd taken photos of the old room so you could actually see why I'm so pleased with the end result.  The official reason, I'm writing about this and posting pictures over the next few weeks is that I have really enjoyed looking at what other people have done for storage and how their craftrooms are set-up and feel like I should feed a few ideas back into the system.  Hopefully someone might find some inspiration here too.  I know its not strictly papercraft, but I'm fairly sure that getting  myself organized is going to be a big plus in actually producing some!

The New Craftroom