My Crafty Space

I have spent the better part of the last four days cleaning out and re-organizing my craft room.  Every now and then I feel the urge to change things around a bit, and this time, I think the result is my favorite thus far!   I always feel so inspired after these mini-makeovers and I can't wait to start creating again in this "new" space!  I'll be sure to share all the details below with you, including some of the inexpensive items I recently purchased to help with organization. 

My craft room is a finished room in our basement - so unfortunately there are no windows, but I selected the neutral beige carpeting to resemble sand and painted the walls Sherwin Williams "Spa" blue to resemble the sky and ocean.  The overall feeling was supposed to resemble the beach!  The room itself is probably 12 feet wide, by 14 feet long.  The first thing you see when you walk down in my craft room is this display wall on the right.  The white bookcase was a recycled find at my local Goodwill store.  The only new item I purchased was the hanging card display.  This was anAmazon find for only $10 and it adhered to the wall with 3M tape.  Yay, no drilling needed! 

Here is a look at my craft desk and my solid color cardstock holders.  I purchased these paper racks on a lucky Craigslist find for $25.    My craft desk is honestly the oldest, heaviest, ugliest thing in this craft room, but it came with our house (I assume it was an old workbench) and it totally works for me!  I love that it is counter top height as I often like to stand when I craft.   If you look in the lower left corner of this photo, you will see my new ink refill organizer.  I'm hoping Mark will hang it up for me this weekend!

Here is a close-up of the new acrylic holder I purchased for my ink refills.  It was originally designed to hold nail polish bottles, but these refills fit perfectly too!  I purchased two of these (at $35 each) as they will hold all of my regular Stampin' UP ink refills and my Spectrum Noir refills.  All of these bottles used to be stored in shoeboxes and that was a pain to sort through to find the colors I needed! 

I love using this acrylic lipstick holder for all of my most used tools.  This was another great Amazon find for only $10.  Scissors, glue pens, tweezers, paint brushes and more all stand up nice and straight so they are easy to locate.  My Spectrum Noir markers are housed in these universal black pen trays and my ink pad holder is from Stamp-N-Storage.

These acrylic risers house some of my other frequently used tools.

All of my Ikea Alex units are labeled using a Brother P Touch machine, so that I can find things easily! 
There is even one labeled "candy" filled with all of my favorites - Swedish Fish, Sour Patch Kids, Runts, Twizzlers, Nerds, etc.  Basically all things red dye #5 and sugar!

All of my stamps are stored on the Ikea Mosslanda 48" picture ledges.  I now have twenty of these installed around my craft room.  I tend to organize my stamps by theme/holiday (Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc) or by company (Hero Arts, MFT, etc).   I love that I can see where everything is.  However, I have pretty much filled up all of these shelves now so I am considering what to do in the future.  Right now I am thinking that I have four shelves dedicated just for Christmas stamps.  I might put those stamps into shoeboxes, since I don't use them as frequently and that would free up some room for now. 

In this photo below, you can really see how much free space I currently  have in the middle of my room, so I have purchased a long table for this area that I will use as a cutting and kitting desk.  I am currently kitting projects on my floor and it's been killing my back for far too long now!

Below you can see my "die wall," which is one of my most asked about projects!  We took a 4' x 8' piece of pegboard and covered it in magnet roll.  For stamps that have coordinating dies, I store them together in their stamp case, but for any die that is a stand alone, it goes on this wall.  And yes, I'm running out of space here too!  I have already taken all of my Christmas dies and put them into ArtBin Magnetic storage cases.

To the right of my fireplace, you can see this white rolling rack.  This is where I keep all of my completed cards.  Yes, this is ALL of them!  That's it!  Does it surprise you that I don't have shoeboxes and shoeboxes of completed cards?  

I organize my cards my theme, so that it's easy for myself (or Mark) to just grab a certain card without pawing through shoeboxes.  Again, that labeling machine comes in handy!

I hope you have enjoyed this little tour of my current craft room.  It's an ever changing space, but I am grateful and blessed to have a dedicated room in which to spend time doing something that I love. 

Thanks for visiting and have a wonderfully creative day!

XO, Crystal