Project 4: Crafting hits the craft supplies

This week I’ve decided that I need to do a project that will continue to give me happiness. I’m going to organize my craft stuff and call it a craft in its own right. Because, and I don’t start a sentence with “because” lightly, I think that if I’m going to continue to do crafts on a weekly basis I need to understand what materials I already have. If you saw my first post you know I love a list. If I could love any strategic thing more than a list, it would be compartmentalizing things. This is a new field of craft: the metacraft.

I thought that I had things pretty well sorted because of the following (and feel free to judge me when you see these “before” photos):

I had my very own craft shelf:

I keep all my papers in a blue plastic bag:

I keep all my card stock, envelopes, peel offs and tools in a blue bin:

I keep all my embellishments in a recycled laundry detergent bin:

And I keep all my ribbons in a bag:

For the record: I have not made these look worse to try to exaggerate the issue. I'm aware I was delusional to think this was a system in the first place. I have no idea where half these ribbons have come from as I rarely get to the bottom of the bag.

This needs to be split over the week because if I tackle this all on a Monday I’m not going to work tomorrow as I’ll stay up until 4am trying to crack this. Small steps before we run. Tonight we tackle paper, cards and tools.

I started with the paper and organized by colour and then size, smallest scraps to big 12x12 virgin sheets. I put these in A4 and 12x12 plastic files, sorted by colour.

Then I emptied the blue bin (I haven’t seen it empty in years) and filled this with envelopes by size, cards, stationery and peel-offs. I filled the sides with glues, tapes and foam pads as well as a bag of ready-made cards from previous adventures in craftland. There are cardboard labels to separate the sections but you can't really see them from above.

Finally I sorted out a box for stamps, one for ink pads and a bag for large punches and embossing folders.

Tomorrow I’ll do ribbons and embellishments but I’m feeling pretty, pretty, pretty good. (We’re going through a Curb phase.)