Craftroom Mania Continues with Anastasia's Craft Room

Today my craft room obsession continues with a tour of Anastasia's craft room.

Ikea Shelf and box drawers

I love Ikea and I love the expedit shelves. They are perfect for organizing crafts. I really wanted enclosed storage but I couldn't spend the money on the individual bins and baskets for each cube, at $13-15 each. My solution was moving boxes from Lowe's. They are actually deeper than the shelf, but with baseboards my shelf didn't sit flush against the wall so they fit perfectly. The bottom row does come out about 1/2 inch or so. The boxes are 16x12x12, so there is more storage than the Ikea bins.  I folded the top flaps in and taped them down and added map themed wrapping paper to the front and along the edge about 3 inches, as that part is slightly visible from the side while the boxes are on the shelf. The labels are metal and already adhesived from Staples. I spray painted them while they were still stuck to the carrier sheet with bronze spray paint, then just peeled them off and adhered them. I added extra packing tape to the bottom for extra strength as well as along the edge of the bottom as the paper would try to rip as it pulled across the shelf. Of course you could cover the boxes in fabric, paper, or even paint them. Some of my drawers do have heavy things in them, I try to put those across the bottom for ease when I pull them out. Just be cautious it is cardboard, I did ruin a box when I dropped my big bite cropadile on one. My drawers don't have labels yet, the labeled one is from my brother's office.

I also use these drawers for my clear and cling stamp storage. For these drawers I cut the side flaps off and put them in the bottom of the box for extra reinforcement. I use expanding file folders for categories, these hold the carrier sheets with stamps. Small or large ones all fit in one folder which makes it easy when I'm working on a project to find all mystamps of that theme. Some categories that I have a large quantity of, like Christmas, I keep in a plastic tote on another shelf. Travel and Postage just have their own box drawer. I like that you can try out themes before you commit to the folder (use post its). For example, I had nature in one but then decided I had enough birds and butterflies to make their own folders.

Embossing folders

A basket from Hobby Lobby, it doesn't get any easier than that. As long as it makes it back to the basket I can flip through those fairly quickly to find what I need.

Plastic drawers- scrap paper storage

I put all usable scraps in here, cardstock or patterned paper. I tried a scrap basket, sort of a catch all and that just didn't work for me, as I would have to dig to the bottom and the paper would get bent. The drawers work for me because each drawer is a separate color, some are combined if there's not a lot of that color, like orange and yellow. I use the deeper drawers for miscellaneous scraps at the bottom as well as pre cut cardstock that I have already cut for cards.

The plastic drawers are from Walmart and I just snapped several units together until I made the number of drawers I needed. This actually takes up a lot of valuable wall space but it is worth it to me because I finally use my scraps. BeforeI went to this system and invested in the extra drawers, I actually tried out individual large Ziploc bags for each color andcategory. Once I decided that's what I wanted then I invested in it.

How awesome is all this organization.  I need to take some lessons from Anastasia.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a tour of Diane's craft room.

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Have a great day and make it, live it and share it.

April

1 Chronicles 29:11  Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everthing in heaven and earth is yours.  Yours, Lord, is the kingdom;  you are exalted as head over all.