1. Paper and Cardstock
·*By color - sort your solid colors, ie. Put the various shades of red together, various shades of blue together, etc.
·*By pattern - sort by patterns, ie. Put your plaid pattern papers together, your stripe pattern papers together, etc.
·*By theme - sort by theme, ie. Put your birthday paper together, your Christmas paper together, etc.
Organizing your paper can also help in not FORGETTING you bought that pretty, special paper for a baby baptism.
As far as storing paper, you may want to consider purchasing a paper storage system of some type to keep your papers from getting bent. There are many great organizational totes, carriers, boxes, crates, etc... out there that you can purchase to help you organize your products. You could also use a large pizza box, unused of course!
Then when you get an idea for a page, it is nice to take the paper you like and any other accessory items (embellishments, stickers, etc.) and put them all in a page protector together, along with the photos. This is a great way to prepare pages in advance. Then when you are ready to sit down and scrapbook, your thought process is already begun!
2. Die Cuts and Page Embellishments
*Sorting by category is usually the easiest. Such as, Christmas, sports, school, animals, baby, letters, etc.
Zip-loc bags work wonderful for sorting and storing embellishments. You can place as many or as few in each bag as you like. Any "pocket style" page or page protector, made of acid free / photo safe materials will work for die cuts, then place them in a three ring binder.
Some scrapbookers like to use tackle boxes for storing embellisments such as eyelets, brads, buttons, etc.
3. Stickers and Phrasez
*As with diecuts, sorting stickers by category is usually the easiest. Such as, Christmas, sports, school, animals, baby, alphabets, etc.
A few things to consider regarding sticker storage are
·
Ease of finding particular stickers when you need them
·Protection for the stickers until they are used.
·Portability, if you attend scrapbooking crops you will want to be able to carry them with you easily
Some good ideas for sorting and storing stickers are:
Use a binder with page protectors. This way you can see your stickers.
Baseball card holders also work well, in the same fashion clear pockets, so you can see your stickers and keep them in a binder. Larger stickers can be stored in page protectors divided into pockets, such as those designed to hold 3x5, 4x6, or 5x7 photographs.
Ziplock bags are also a great way to store them, so that you can sort through them without damaging the stickers. You could then store the bags in a file box.
**You may even want to store stickers and diecuts together by category! I find that sometimes I forget I have a diecut that would have matched a particular theme I was working on. Only later to find the diecut!
What about the rest of my scrapbooking tools?
As far as the rest of your Scrapbooking tools, you need to first take into account the amount of space you have to devote to this wonderful hobby! If it is a box, table, closet, corner of a room, entire room, etc
From there you will need to find a system that works for you. Keep the most used tools where you can easily get to them, such as your scissors, paper trimmer, adhesive, and pens. You may just want a simple school-type pencil box to store your pens, scissors, and adhesive in. Once you decide on a system that works for you, keep it simple!! You want to concentrate on your Scrapbooking not on always RE-organizing.
*There are great storage bags out there!!!
If you are needing more assistance with organizing, please feel free to
Or if you have any questions or comments about the lessons in general!
Jan Pepe, # 402389www.MakingScrapbooks.comMakingScrapbooks@comcast.net
Scrapbooking 101
Lesson 4
How do you organize your supplies?
Organizing is a great way to make your Scrapbooking SIMPLE and CONVENIENT!
You can use a variety of ways to organize your supplies, I am going to just list the
types of supplies, and give suggested ways of organizing. Of course, you will want
to find the style of organization that works best for you! Remember, scrapbooking
is supposed to fun, not a chore! So if you organize yourself, you will spend less
time trying to find things, and more time making and preserving memories!
