If you've known me personally, you probably know that I'm a very disorganized person. It's just not in me. And you may say, "Oh gosh, Sara, it can't be that bad." And I respond with an, "Oh, no, it is that bad. It was so bad that in elementary school the kids used to hate getting set in a desk-grouping with me because I always had the messiest desk and consequently we were generally the last table to get to go to lunch.
Anyways, where am I going with all of this? Well, to be honest, I haven't improved much. But, I have made a severe step in organizing my life with my craft room. To say I have some "stuff" is a vast understatement. I have a poop-load of crafting supplies, mostly scrapbooking. It outgrew our garage so inside I came and searched for the best way to store my ridiculous amount supplies. You can go back to my My Scrapbook Room post to see all the deets. Anywho, I'm continually looking for good ways to store all my supplies and make them more accessable. I kept running into a problem with my Distress inks, especially since I just got the new 12 colors. I have one of the extra large ranger cropper hopper storage bins meant for the Ranger Adirondak inks. I use this to store everything and it's out on a shelf, but it's been kind of a pain in the butt to constantly open and close it, go through all of the colors just to find a couple that I need and then try to match the foam pads to the right ink pad. So, finally I came up with this:
I had some adhesive backed paper I cut into strips and distress inked with each pad I owned then wrote the name of the ink color. I've just decided to keep the whole case open since I use my distress inks so often. I was going to try and take off the front cover, but was hesitant since these storage cases are no longer being produced and are considered gold by rubber stampers.
So the first photo you saw at the top of the post is all of my distress ink pads in little jewelry ziplocs (found at your local craft store in the beading aisle). I used the same adhesive-backed paper to label each little bag, and used my crop-o-dile to punch a hole in the top. I then threaded them through a large 2" loose-leaf book ring (found at your local office supply store).
Ahhhhh... now that makes my brain feel a lot better. Everything has its place and I don't need to be mixing colors on foam pads. Because I've tried to use walnut stain on a black soot pad and it didn't turn out too well... oops.
Thanks for visiting! Have a great day!
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3 comments:
Great tips, Sara! I'm going thru the same process with my room, it's taking freaking forever. I bought a sock drawer organizer at Tuesday Morning, and turned it on it's side for the ink pads, and guess what? They're still just stacked all over the desk... lol. Great idea for the foam, too. Thank God you didn't alter that tin, I can hear the gasps of dismay and horror reverberating all over the world if you had....
what are those adorable little wood handled things in your case??? im coveting them!!!
So Sara, are you talking about the little foam pads that go with the Ink Blending tool??? I keep all of mine in a plastic box and they seem to work out fine. I periodically wash them so I can switch out the colors but I have almost enough for each Distress color that I own. Just try to keep like colors with like colors. I do love your idea of using little zip locks to keep them separated though and might do that to prevent the inks from getting everywhere inside my box.
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