Last week The Organizing Junkie listed a few fun scrapbook organizing tools. This month she is focusing on organizing craft areas, but doesn’t have one herself. That isn’t stopping her from coming up with all sorts of creative solutions.
Her post last week made me think about my craft room and scrapbook tool storage.
I am an avid scrapbooker. (Although I will confess that since I’ve become a blogger I haven’t made much time to crop.)
I went through many a storage system before I finally found the way to store my cropping tools in a way that works for me. And I love the system I finally developed.
I do have spot for cropping at home, but I most often crop with friends at retreats or evening crops, so portability was critical to me for storage. I wanted an easy way to crop and an easy way to move my gear… without having to re-pack it every time. And I figured it out!
Now I can be out the door in less than 10 minutes without any previous packing. And I have a LOT of fun tools!
“How ever can this be done?” you ask.
Here it is, the bulk of my storage system, snug in its storage spot:
And here is peek inside, ready to bungee and roll… or ready to crop, after I unload and plug in my Cricut die -cutting system. (Oh! That could be a whole post or series on its own!)
It is an elpha storage tower from The Container Store with wheels attached. My paper is stored in a large album (as in LP) box that sets on top and I keep a bungee cord around the tower to serve two purposes:
1. To keep little fingers out of my cutting blades.
2. To keep the drawers closed when I’m driving about town.
I keep this baby in the kids’ craft room/ playroom and roll it into position whenever I am ready to scrapbook.
Originally this spot was built to be a changing station in a nursery, but the baby has moved on and now I share the space with the kids. And I benefit from the large trash drawer (on the left) and wide counter space.
Plus the kids can craft right along behind me or work on homework at their own spot:
I found these groovy rods and cups for way cheap and asked my dh to hang them for us.
I saw something similar in a Pottery Barn catalog, but found these in the kitchen section of Ikea for a fraction of the price. (The magnet strips were from there, too.)
As you might have noticed, there are double doors leading into the room and I’ve hung shoe pockets (also from Ikea) along the backs of the doors and stashed other crafting and gift-wrapping tools inside of the pockets. Each pocket is then labeled with masking tape. (That makes it super-easy to change the labels should I need to… And it’s cheap!)
I love my little nook. The counter is high, so I can leave tools out between projects, or I can stash them in a snap and roll my cart back to its home. And I like that I always have a clear spot for wrapping gifts with my tools at the ready.
Okay, hope you don’t mind my little gloat. But if seeing this can help someone from buying all the storage systems and making all the mistakes I did before I found this one, I thought I should post away, because it really works for me.
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