My Craftroom - before cleaning!

I thought I'd share my craftroom with you. Sometimes it's very tidy... but inevitably the piles of stuff encroach on the working space until I'm left with about one square foot of desk and all the rest is piles 'o crap. Add in the large grey furry cat who insists on keepind me company, and there's nowhere to work at all! Such is the state today, and I've vowed to redeem it tomorrow. But first, the honest before photos, taken just a few minutes ago.

1. A view of the desk area, taken from as far back as I could manage to get. As you can see, right now there's more junk than space. Immediately after I took this photo a cat wandered across the desk, sniffed in disgust, and went away to find a flat surface with enough clear space to sit!

2. The pile-o-junk stuffed in the corner of the room, with my paper cabinet and junk collection. You can see the edge of my card display on your left. As swaps and cards come in I hang them over the slats of my closest door. It's about time to cull the ranks and to make room for more - my door is full!

3. The top half of my bakers' rack and paper storage area. The scrap paper, ribbon basket and card storage rack are the only part of the room I'm really pleased with atm!

4. The bottom half of my baker's rack, and my filing cabinet. The bottom drawer holds personal files, and the top has my papercrafting magazines/books and my postcard collection, for want of any better place to store it.

5. My Iris cart and paper tray, and some boxes-o-junk under the desk. Also some more of my card storage rack tucked in beside them. The cane basket has old paperwork which is probably mostly trash by now.

6. I almost forgot the last corner of the room. I have various supplies in the chest of drawers. The pink thing in the back corner is our hurricane cart (which sorely needs a complete redo before July), and the stuff on the floor is household paperwork. The brown chair is for guests to sit on when John works on their computer, and for the cats to use as a step up to my desk if they don't feel like jumping that high. Scouty tends to 'miss' her jumps when the desk is crowded, and if she's fallen to the floor once she doesn't want to try again that day! If you turn to your right you can just see the corner of John's desk. Right now his working space is MUCH cleaner and tidier than mine and he's putting me to shame.

So there you have it... the before photos. And as I get it tidied, I'll take the 'afters'...

My new Ribbon Storage System

I used to have my ribbons in four different places - I had rolls of plain ribbon in a plastic ribbon storage box, short bits of ribbon wound around themselves in a plastic embellishment box, and odds and ends in shoeboxes mixed in with my fibers and lace etc. It was hard to know where to look to find anything and the mini-rolls kept getting lost in the clutter...
I was thinking of getting a wire mesh basket to put my ribbons in and threading them through the sides so I could pull bits out as needed, and I've looked in Ross a few times to try to get my hands on a suitable container, but I saw a better idea on the Crafty Storage Blog - a few days ago they featured someone who put all their spools of ribbon into a woven basket and threaded them through the back... that sounded perfect to me - baskets are MUCH cheaper than those expensive plastic boxes or metal tins, and you could fit a heck of a lot of ribbon into the right-sized basket.

Yesterday I went to Ross and I found the perfect Ribbon Basket - it's woven from seagrass so it's very flexible and easy to poke the ribbons through wherever I want them, and the spaces between the spokes are large enough for a ribbon up to an inch wide. The only thing it doesn't have is a top to keep the dust (and cats) out, but a piece of cardboard will fix that.

I put the larger ribbons towards the bottom so they wouldn't cover up the narrow ones, and arranged them in a kind of rainbow all around the basket. The only ribbons that I did NOT put into the basket are my very narrowest spools of plain ribbon - since I already have an expensive ribbon box for them, I left them alone.The basket is up on top of my paper storage drawers (out of cat-reach) and sitting on a lazy susan so I can swing it around and access all four sides easily.

Total Cost -
Seagrass basket from Ross - $6.99
Lazy Susan from Ikea - $7.99 (I think, I bought it some time ago)
Time taken to sort and thread all my ribbons - a couple of hours
Having my ribbons stored where I can actually see them all at the same time - priceless

Storing my cards

 I was too busy to make cards today... so I'm going to share my new card storage method with you. I used to put all my finished cards into a plastic shoebox. It kept them nice and it fitted on the shelf easily within arm's reach... but you can't see what's in it unless you pull the lot out and flip through them, so it's easy to forget what's there. Also it doesn't hold as many cards as I needed it to.

I saw somebody online who was putting their finished cards into an over-the-door-shoe-holder. That seemed like a great idea so I went shopping. Ross didn't have any shoe holders with clear pockets... so I looked in the Dollar Tree. They had one... but right above it were 'hanging pocket storage' with a choice of five or six pockets in each. I bought a six-pocket holder, brought it home and hung it up... and immediately realised that I had a bunch more room. So I went back and bought a second, and I fastened them together myself. I put duck tape on the back where you can't see it, clear packing tape on the front, and I finished it off with four eyelets set into the edges with my cropodile. I taped it to my paper drawers with  more clear tape.

Then I started figuring out how best to use it. This is subject  to change, but the pockets are labelled as follows:

• Love
• Friendship
• Birthday
• Thinking of you/Miss you
• Encouragement/general
• Children (I don't make a lot of kiddy cards...)
• Current Holiday
• Next Holiday
• Future Holidays
• Next Year (in case I make cards for a holiday that's already passed...)
• Any Hero Cards

Each pocket looks like it will hold about 20 cards, so that's PLENTY of room! And I left my other supplies and partially finished card bases in the shoebox.

Found Furniture is the best!

I haven't forgotten about this blog... I've just been very busy for the last week doing some baking for Church, so I haven't had any time for crafting. A friend's husband died a few weeks ago and his memorial service was on Saturday, and I offered to bake for it. Now that the funeral's over my catering responsibilities are at an end (for now) and I'll have some more time to get back into my craft room.

I signed up for an inchie swap last month and I whipped up the inchies yesterday, and dropped them in the mail. On the way back from the post office I noticed what looked like a bookcase out by the skip behind our building. Closer investigation revealed it to be a large shoe-rack. Hooray! I've wanted one of those for ages, so I dragged it upstairs and cleaned it off. It's not in perfect condition, but you can't tell when it's shoved under my desk in my craftroom, and you won't be able to tell at all once it's filled up with craft supplies.



Ignore the mess on top of the desk... the relevant part is the storage shelf underneath. As you can see it's the perfect size to fit under the desk! And the total cost to me was zero dollars and just a few scrapes to my shins as I dragged the thing up the stairs. It's not heavy, but it's tall and the back has come off it, so the rough presswood was scratching me up at every step. But it was worth it. I keep most of my craft supplies in those el cheapo shoeboxes you get at the dollar tree, and they're piled up all over the place in my craftroom. This rack will store twenty of them at my fingertips! That's a LOT of supplies! Plus it frees up space on my bakers rack for more awkward-to-store items. I'm going to have fun figuring out how best to rearrange everything.