Sunday School: Organize that Stash!

Good morning CraftyStealers! It's Sunday School time again!

I don't know about all of you, but I'm on a constant mission to get my "stuff" organized.  With the tulips and daffodils starting to bloom around here, it's time to start my spring cleaning.  And this Spring, I'm focusing on our office/craft room.  The room was originally my son's nursery, and then later, my daughter's (it's on the same level as my bedroom).  About a year ago, we moved her upstairs and moved our office into this room.

Now, I have seen pictures of gorgeous craftrooms online, but since I have to share the space with my husband, I had to make some compromises. (He wouldn't go for the white furniture!).  So we purchased shelving, and desks, and I stuffed them full of my craft and art supplies that I pulled from the backs of cosets where they had previously been living.  I promised myself that I was going to organize my stash and be able to utilize the space to get more crafting done!! 

Yet here I am a year later, with no real organizational system in place, stuff jumbled together in drawers and cabinets (which makes it very difficult to get ANYTHING done.  Plus, for some reason my stuff seems to be multiplying in the shelves when I turn my back! (I blame CraftySteals). 


Here's what it looks like today. Now, I'm giving the real life version here - boxes and junk and all.  (I will admit to cleaning off the desktop though!). 

So this week starts my own personal Mission Organization, and along the way, I'm going to show you how I'm progressing and give you some tips on taming your treasures too. 

Today, I'm starting small, with my paper scraps.  (I'll tackle the actual paper later!).  I'm a person who saves scraps of all sizes.  I used to throw them in a drawer.  A drawer, (at least in my experience) is NOT a good method for storing the scraps to help me find them and actually USE them later.

Sometimes the answer is so simple.  And I didn't have to pay a penny for it.

I took a 12X12 album that I already had laying around (I don't use post-bound albums anymore, but have a few empty ones from years ago). 
I put in sheet protectors and a piece of 12X12 white paper in each one. The paper acts as a divider so I can get two scrap "pockets" from each protector.

Then I took my stack o' scraps and sorted them.  Now the way you sort is very personal, but I chose to do it by color and also by theme if that fit better.
Then I made tabs (I made these on the Silhouette), laminated them, and attached them to the page protectors.

Put the scraps in the pockets and label them accordingly!

Now I have handy scrap storage that can easily be changed if I need another color or paper theme added (I used a dry erase marker to label so changing the tabs is easy).  It takes up almost no space and you can see what scraps you have so much more easily than if they were jumbled all together in a box or drawer.


What about you? Anyone else working on organzing? Any other fabulous ideas to store scraps? Or do they go directly into the recycle bin...  

Have a great Sunday!