Organization Article by Lain Ehmann

I received this via email this am - very much where I am at right now - so - read on and then a few questions

Hello, Scrappy People
Have you ever sat down to scrapbook, started pulling your photos together and toying with design ideas, only to hit a wall? You know you have orange brads - somewhere. You know you have black-and-white ribbon - somewhere. And where in the heck did you store the Halloween goodies you bought at half-off at the end of last season?

Suddenly, you can't find what you need. So you either waste a ton of time finding all your supplies, or you go ahead and try to finish your layout without the supplies you want. Bummer.

One of my biggest tips for faster scrapbooking is to have your supplies organized in a manner so you can quickly and easily find what you need. There are a couple of ways to split up your scrapbooking supplies:


*By type (all brads together, all letter stickers together, all buttons together, etc.)
*By theme (Halloween stuff in one spot, Christmas products together, etc.)

*By product line (Cosmo Cricket in one spot, American Crafts in one place, etc.)
*By color (Stacy Julian has a great series of videos on how she organizes her embellishments by color.)

No one method works for everyone, and you may end up using a combination. For instance, you might organize largely by type, but have all your holiday themed items in another spot. The next time you sit down to create a page, think about how you naturally look for your supplies. Then try organizing that way. Let me know what you discover!

P.S. For more tips on organizing specific scrapbook supplies, check out my blog's Scrapbook Supplies Storage section.

Lain

Now for a question

How do you store your items? I picked to tell about the only two that seems to be right at the current time - other items are still not quite where they need to be.

Mine is a mix of the above and still in process - not sure I will ever have it completely finalized, but it is easier to find paper these days

papers - cardstock in one 'bin', pp in another, stacks in a third. Then I have the row on the shelf of plastic 'kits' without photos (some are in progress - but they are usually sorted by line of paper with matching bazzill if it was for a swap). Holiday specific has its own area - Christmas, Easter, whatever Scraps - sorted by color into those plastic drawers - they are getting used more and more now

Letter Stickers - I never collected very many, so they all fit into a single box that, now that they are there, I am actually using much more often

All my items are stored by theme, color or shape in it's own containers or shelves. I still have some sorting to do, but I'm not in a hurry to finish.

The main thing I would like to sort are my rubber stamps and maybe pull them off the wooden blocks and store like my clear stamps.