Mondays with Martha: Craft Storage Solutions

I'm in the process of getting back into jewelry-making in preparation for various holiday craft sales (to which you are cordially invited--details to follow). But before I can make jewelry I have to re-organize my jewelry workbench. The process of doing that made me think that maybe I should write about craft storage for small spaces. You see, I love crafty blogs, but the pictures of people's work spaces never much apply to me because I don't have a whole craft room, just a corner here and there. And I think a lot of people are in my boat.

So with that in mind, here is Martha's ribbon storage solution for someone with unlimited craft storage space.



 

That's very pretty, but I think the percentage of people with that much ribbon is pretty small, and the percentage of people ready to devote an entire wall to their ribbon collection is even smaller. So for the rest of us, here is how to fit all your scrapbook stuff onto three or four shelves.

See that pretty pink bucket? Aunt Becky painstakingly brought it to me on an airplane. Thanks, Aunt Becky! The bucket is just a regular utility bucket with a tool holder in it.  It's much cheaper than the scrapbooking organizers, but works just as well. The bag next to it holds either paper or an album to take with me when I go on a scrapbooking evening or weekend.

This is a file crate from Target, and it's just wide enough for 12x12 paper. I should've taken a picture from the top, but you can get the idea.

Those boxes are for each child's album. I'm way behind in the kids' albums, so it's nice to have a box per kid where I can just stuff the school pictures, report cards, pictures from the birthday parties, stickers designated for a particular event, etc. The bottom shelf is a mishmash of pictures waiting to be sorted into albums. The only thing that didn't get into the pictures is a bag of 12x12 envelopes that hold my stickers. I need a better storage solution for those, and probably half of them are ready to be passed down to the kids. A project for another day.

I started this post talking about jewelry, so here is my workbench, waiting to be sorted. Hopefully posting these pictures will motivate me to get organized so I can have "after" pictures.

I'd love to hear about your brilliant hobby storage solutions, especially if you have space issues like I do!