Hi friends...
Firstly I want to apologise for such a long post.
Today i have post on boring but very important topic. Every person need some sort of organisation. I was always concerned about organising as i cant work in messy place.
I agree as we start working the area get messy. In my view ORGANISING means, easy to put back the things in their place and finding them easily when you need. If you have to search or break your head to remember were you kept then I am sure you wont use it again and forget about it.
Here is my small effort to share my ideas on organising things, hope you like it.
Organising is not an easy task to accomplish and maintain unless and untill you know what you have and how much place you have. First and formost i categorised what I have? What are my different hobbies so that I can keep the respective items together.
My first concern was my embroidery books, clothe( Matti cloth for Kasuti-Karnataka Kasuti which is the traditional embroidery of Karnataka).
Then came the paper crafting items, items to be organised are more so i categorised them on type like papers, stamps, dies, inks, embellishments.
In this i kept all my embellishments like sequins, enamel dots in one box.
All papers in their repective covers and i have plain 12x12 papers from Reena Gupta and for card base and other purpose I buy in local market (get them cut in printing press, score and fold them which saves lot of time and space).
Then came stamps and dies
Selection of pockets - Here the first thing i did was searching for poskets to store them.
I was not at all convinced by the typical stamp storage pockets which many use. They are costly because they are imported. go for imported if you wont get in local market.
I bought 1kg of plastic covers in local market in which i got nearly 150 covers. I sat and made flaps (sounds crazy but not as crazy as spending lots of money on imported stamp pockets) for them as they wont come with ready flaps. These are 9" long covers so you can adjust the height of the cover ;). For most of the dies i used CD covers.
Then came labelling
Selection of label - I first thought of printing all label on A4 sheet cut them and stick with tixo tape. It didnt work for me. Then i thought of buying label maker but the cost of that and refill made me drop the idea. Then i saw a label sheet on ebay and bought the pack of 100 sheets for 350/- which is lot cheaper(in money wise) than labelling machine and refill. The label is Novajet self adhesive label .
In that i used 84L label. It has instructions inside to type and print labels. I printed labels for dies,stamps, embossing folders.
Ink pads
For ink pads i felt these are perfect labels. If you want you can trim a little bit but they worked fine for me. After attaching labels to ink pads I realised that I forgot to stamp on them with respective colour. So when you want to do this please stamp and them attach. I have not organised them in any particular order. All die, pigments are together exceptions being black n white inkpads.
I have distress mini so i store them in transparent box. along with 4 memento dew drops and few color box chalk inks..
Stamp storage
I was bit worried about storing stamps. Because IF I WONT SEE I WONT USE. So i took this idea from Jennifer McGuiere. I soon realised that the pockets can fit two stamp sets in them. So i placed two sets in one pocket which will help me in future(I already saved lots of space for upcoming stamp sets). For few stamp sets i trimmed the plastic backing they come with so that they can fit in the cover. The few larger stamps i placed one in one pocket. These pockets are right for big sets like Altenew rose/flower sets too.
For sets which had matching dies i made a red dot on the label itself so that i can make out which set has matching die.
I kept smaller stamps like these in cd cover.
For background stamps i didnt do any packing. I just attached the label on their backing sheet.
Die storage
It was bit difficult to store dies for me. First i used to store them with magnetic sheets. As the collection increased it became difficult for me to look at them because of the weight. Then i switched to CD covers. But there were few sets which needed magnetic sheets for them i am using magnetic sheets.
These are the above stamp covers but i trimmed them to the size of 5x6" so that they can fit exactly to the set.
This is the original size of the cover without any further trimming. For dies like these i use magnetic sheets. But i have only two sets like this.
Embossing folders
For embossing folders i didnt do much as they are strong enough to hold themselves. I put the label and thats it.
That is it. This is my organisation. to sum up every thing. Dies and background stamps in one container.
Stamps and embossing folders in another.
Hope you liked it. If you liked please comment bellow.
Thank you for being with me till the end.
Swapna