I am now only a day or two away from having the full overhaul and clean out of my craft room finished! As promised I’ll be taking pictures of all of it, but for right now I’m posting the general craft supply areas. These storage ideas could also help someone working on an online degree in art, with a ton of art supplies to store.  I know when I was working on my degree there were half used paint tubes and scraps of paper all over the place! I previously posted about organizing zippers and organizing buttons.  By doing this I hope to give you a few ideas of how to organize your own crafts and supplies. I use mostly items that I have laying around the house and that most people would throw away to do all of my organizing. I DID buy these two small drawer units, 2 of the collapsible crates and 3 (only one seen here) of the large drawer units over 2 years ago on clearance; I think they cost me under $50 for all of it. That’s a lot for me, but they have been well worth it. The other two large drawer units are used to store some of my Etsy things. All of these images can be enlarged by clicking on them.

I started out by labeling my small drawers. I did this by simply cutting pieces of scrapbooking paper to size and then writing what was in each drawer on the backs. I slipped the papers into the fronts of the drawers and used two pieces of scotch tape to hold them in place. Everyone who has ever bought a stack of scrapbooking paper has found a few pieces that they find incredibly ugly, LOL, I’ve found a million uses for these papers and this is one of them. I would like to do something a little bit nicer with this, but I’m not sure what, so at the moment this will have to do.

The collapsible crate is where I store my scraps. If a scrap piece is smaller than about 4X5 or isn’t a long consistent-width strip, I shred it instead of keeping it with the larger pieces. All of the shreds, pieces like salvage edges and thread balls most people would throw away, go into a bag (mine is a reusable shopping bag that I got for free). I save these scraps to use as stuffing. This saves me from having to buy stuffing when I want to make a toy or a draft-blocker for the back door. The shredded pieces work better than if they were left slightly larger, this way they fill small spaces just like batting would. To organize the scrap basket itself I separated everything into piles by type of fabric because that usually determines what I pull out when I’m looking in it. The larger piles went into small paper shopping bags. I like to use these because some of them are made very strong and they hold their structure. Here I used a Williams-Sonoma bag and one from Anthropologie. The Anthro bag is particularly thick and that’s why I kept it! LOL. The smaller piles went into various sizes of plastic zip-bags. Most of those were larger than the standard gallon size and came as packaging on new items thqt we’ve bought over time and that I squirreled away. My embroidery hoops are stored on a double wall hook that was left on one of the closet shelves when we moved in; it works pretty good, but  wish I had another one. I have many hooks like this back in Indiana, but this is all I had here at the moment so I am making due.

Two of the three large drawers are used mostly for scrapbooking and paper craft storage. I reuse the 12X12 plastic envelopes that scrapbooking paper comes in to store my specialty papers. I found a large 12X12 twist-closure plastic envelope at a thrift store for 75 cents I think and since it is large, I use that for my plain papers. My embellishments, stickers, etc are kept in standard size, purple, twist-closure plastic envelopes that I had left over from college. I also had a large purple plastic accordion folder that I use for smaller than 12X12 pieces and salvaged scraps that I find here and there. I actually have a lot of paper because I used to work for a newspaper that was also a printing company. LOl I would dig large scraps of colored or cool textured papers out of the garbage cans (used only for paper) in the shop and save what I could from sample boxes that came in before they made it to the garbage. I use a mint tin to hold my paper cutter and X-acto blades all in one place. An upside down lid from a 100-CD stack works perfectly for everything from scissors to markers to beads. I use mine here for my dollar store decorative-cut scissors and int he top drawer I use one for all of my patches and appliques. I reuse small boxes and cover them with paper to store lots of things. There is a yellow one in the top drawer as well as the very long white one that I use to keep my bias tape and such. That box is actually the packaging that kept my Wii Fit extender platform from banging around in the box. We used to use it to hold pill bottles, but now it holds my notions in perfect alignment. The opaque white boxes are from my favorite Dove face-scrubby pads. A few years ago they discontinued the style that I liked, so I got online and bought several cases of them on discount. Each case came with one of these for every two refill containers. Since I only really needed two of the little pop-top plastic boxes for the storage of my scrubbies themselves (one for home and one for travel) I have used the rest all over the house! LOL They are perfect and secure for storing any number of smallish craft supplies. In these three drawers alone I use them for glue sticks, snaps & hooks, Velcro pieces, tassels and sewing machine parts/tools.

My “MISC” drawer is always difficult to make look nice, LOL by way of zip-bags I’ve tried my best. My jewelry supply drawer is mostly organized with round tins and round stackible mini-jars. The mini jars were bought, when I was in high school  for my then smallish bead hoard, lol, when it grew larger I was lucky enough to find a 24 pack of the clear-top metal tins in the clearance aisle for $8 I think it was. I also use small baggies for the beads I don’t have tins for. The large zip-bag full of small baggies is where I keep all of the jewelry hardware. The dove box is full of broken old jewelry that I can use to fix or make NEW items and the (what was once a) Crystal Light mix jar is full of beads that were too numerous to fit into a tin.

This drawer holds my sewing hardware like handles and straps. The big white thing is a large homemade envelope to keep my “metal fabric” from snagging and there is another Dove box, this one has buckles and frogs and stuff like that in it. The stamping and embossing drawer is fairly normal with just a zip-bag and the original packages.

I write the name of the color in each bottle on the top of my paints so that I don’t have to pull them out individually to see them, it make it easier for me. I used an apron that I was given at a charity event to make the brush holders. I cut it down to 2 inches above the pocket line, hemmed the edges and then sewed lines in it to hold the brushes. This keeps them from sliding around in the drawer and displays them for me to be able to quickly see and pick the one I want.

The calligraphy and drawing drawer is pretty basic and uses the original packaging. I use a little bead organizer and cardboard bobbins for my embroidery thread. As you can tell from the bobbins on the right, I never throw away the left over thread from a kit. LOL. The knitting needles were from a thrift store, I bought a HUGE pack for $1 and this is only about half of them, the rest I’ve set aside for a future giveaway.

The most colorful of all of the drawers is the marker/crayon/colored pencil drawer. I keep my sharpies in the pink, blue and green hard-sided pencil cases. My few non-heirloom pastels are in a homemade envelope to keep them from marking up other things and the colored pencils are in a zip-bag. I had, literally over 1,000 crayons. I never threw them away, ever… LOL I sorted out the ones that I wanted to keep and made the rest into larger crayons that I intend to give away, probably to one of my cousins. I was still left with A LOT of them that I needed to organize so I took two plastic folders that I have had for 2 years and cut them into2.5 inch strips the length of the width fo the drawer and 4 or them I cut down to be about 6 inches long. I made notches in the bottom of the long ones and in the tops of the 6 inch ones and put them together to resemble the type of packaging used for bottles or glasses. This gave me a bunch of little spaces to put the crayons which I arranged in color order.