Tidy studio spaces rock

Stuff. There’s my vintage suitcases and all the other cool things that I collect. They take up a lot of room. Inspiring magazines are wonderful but they are in ugly stacks everywhere. And I am buying more fabric when I already have what I need, only I can’t find where it is. Sound familiar?

One thing is for sure. Having a mess everywhere makes me feel less creative. I can’t speak for you but I know that I love having everything neat and organized and accessible. So I have been looking through books and magazines for ideas. Here are my top 5 things that I did to make my craft room my happy place.

I stacked all the trunks in my trunk collection and put them to work as very cool storage. Now most of my ideas are not original, but they usually have my own twist to them. I have seen trunks stacks for storage before. But as much as I wanted to store stuff in the suitcases, I envisioned it being like the old find-the-pea-under-one-of the-cups magic trick. Out of sight, out of mind. I probably would have to open every one of those suitcases to find what I was looking for. So my solution was to make cool tags with stamped words on them revealing the contents. I attached the tags to the handles of each trunk to make it easy to see what was what.

I also have a cool collection of vintage tackle boxes, lunchboxes, and tool boxes that are also serving storage purposes. One made a great organizer for my jewelry making supplies. The others are waiting for my final decision as to what will go in them. Maybe sewing notions.

Or my stamp collection. Or beads. Some of them share space with my books on the bookshelf as they add a nice splash of color.

My next idea might seem obvious to you: put things in the drawers. Before you laugh, remember what I said earlier about things being out of sight and soon after being out of mind. Well, I hate drawers for that reason. I just put things in drawers and forget about them. So sometimes I may have drawers with nothing in them at all. What a waste obviously! But my problem had a fun solution as I figured out that I could use the same tag system for drawers, hanging the tag on the drawer knob. So now my button box collection is in its cupboard. And my knitting needles are in a drawer.

Wool  storage was simple for wool yardage. Open shelves keep everything out in the open and organized, within easy reach at a moment’s notice. It was important for me to find a wall that did not get very much direct sunlight, which over time might fade my colors.

But a more complex problem is taking charge of all of the leftover strips from each hooked rug project. My solution is to organize strips by color and contain them in zippered vinyl bags. I keep all of the bags in a cabinet.

My magazines can easily get out of hand. Ikea has great magazine organizers that are covered in a linen-look fabric have a place for a label. But I don’t keep all of my magazines. Even if I wanted to there are not enough hours in the day to go through all of them again to find that special fill-in-the-blank that I was saving them for. So cut out the special parts and recycle the rest.

Take the pages you love and make a condensed version. Use clear reference sheet protectors with 3-ring binders to make your own inspiration folders. When you collect enough photo pages, you may even want to organize them by subject such as textiles, gardens, knitting, jewelry, or studio spaces.

Now that everything is organized I feel a burst of creativity coming on! If I could just get off this computer…

Smiles ~ Karen

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