Getting Organized - The Room!

Since I'm in the process of organizing things I thought I would post a few pictures of my room at it's worst. I'm a binge artist. I go for a few weeks with so many ideas and projects happening all around me I can't think straight. Then the chaos of the room starts to overwhelm me and I have to put everything away again.

We moved into this house in April of 2006 and I have redone my room several times. Obviously I should have planned it out better to begin with but with everything else going on in the move I couldn't devote myself to my craftroom. The first time I sponge painted the walls dark blue. I added a lot of bright orange accents and curtains and I loved the colors but the sponge paint was too busy with everything else hanging on my walls in there. A few months later I repainted the walls my favorite color, a calming green. I made new curtains, hung a shelf in my closet and tried to reorganize things so they were more accessible. I haven't repainted again but I have arranged and rearranged my supplies a number of times and I am finally beginning to get a handle on this situation.

Earlier this year a great friend of mine gave me some old metal storage cubes he didn't want anymore and I hung several pegboard on the wall above my work surface for tools. Huge improvement!

Getting Organized - Ribbon!

I was so inspired by seeing all my beads organized that I decided to move on to another one of my supplies that has outgrown every storage solution I've had for it. I have ribbon on big spools, on little spools and on no spools at all. I have wide trim, thin trim and tasseled trim. And I finally came up with something that will work for all of it! Way back in the way back, when I used to buy CD's, I bought several matching CD racks. I moved all the CD's into crates years ago once I got them all digitized and those old CD racks are my new ribbon racks. I even have two more so my ribbon collection has plenty of room to grow!

I put the pegs in the back lower than the pegs in the front so that all the shelves slope backwards and my ribbon won't roll off.

I seperated all the smaller loose pieces of ribbon by color and organized them into storage boxes.

Getting Organized - Beads!

It's not as easy as it sounds! I am not an organized kind of person but sometimes I can certainly see the benifits in trying to be! So I decided to tackle one of my biggest headaches and work on getting my beads in order. I have thousands of beads in all shapes, sizes and colors so it was no easy task.

I started with my seed beads. I moved them all into these containers that screw together and seperated them by color. They were the most difficult to organize and once I finished with them I knew the really hard part was over. The rest of the beads got seperated by type and organized into flip top containers.

Stone chips and beads

More stone and hematite beads

Metal beads

Acrylic beads

Shell beads

Bells

Findings

After several hours I am very pleased with the results and I'm glad I did it! Now I'm actually motivated to move on to some of my other supplies and maybe eventually I'll get the whole room to the point where I'm not embarrassed to let people peek their heads in there.