Hello everyone, it’s Zinia and today I’m back on the American Crafts blog to share with you a peek into my craft space.
Last month, we had a few of my fellow design team members sharing their craft rooms. I won’t lie to you, I’m a little jealous of their beautiful and well-organized rooms. Unfortunately, I need to travel a lot between two cities so I don’t have a permanent workspace. For that reason, I can’t justify investing in furniture or expensive equipment to organize and decorate my space.
However that doesn’t mean I can’t create a beautiful craft room without spending money on fancy organization solutions. Let me show you around and share with you some little tips and tricks I used to customize my space.
Most of the boxes I use to store my smaller products are food containers. My dad discovered these plastic boxes and they come in two different sizes, so I’ve been saving them ever since and I use them to store all the supplies I have nearby as well as to keep things organized when I store them away in a drawer.
Since I don’t have a second desk or a drawer unit to keep my most used supplies, I stacked two coffee tables on top of each other to create a taller work surface and that’s where I put most of my crafty supplies.
At the top part of those coffee tables I keep some sturdy cardboard boxes to create an extra level of DIY shelves and gain more storage space.
I organized my supplies based on manufacturer/designer and I use different boxes for each category. I also love labeling things to make them easier to access like the American Crafts planner sticker books that create a beautiful rainbow next to my other crafty supplies.
As I mentioned earlier, I really love labeling things as well as color-coding. I have a different system for every type of product depending on my needs but it usually goes by manufacturer, designer or release date.
I generally try to keep my supplies with their collections or sets. This became very tricky for my washi tape collection but I found a trick to make it work. I keep all my washi tapes organized by set but instead of using the original boxes, I hold together the rolls of each set using rubber bands. That makes it super easy to search through them and pull out the set I need.
I like keeping my supplies out on display so I remember to use them. If I hide something in a drawer, it’s not very likely that it will get used. That also goes for my pens and markers. As my pen collection grew, I found it hard to keep 10 pencil cups around my desk cause they were taking a lot of space. To solve that problem I created a DIY pen organizer using some inexpensive pieces of foamboard.
Each compartment houses a different type of pen/marker and I also have some extra space on top to keep a few jars with my favorite hand lettering pens by Kelly Creates.
Another thing I started doing recently is to keep my most used planner stickers next to my computer. My planner stays open next to my computer desk all the time but every time I needed to add a new task I was lazy to go and grab my sticker books from my crafting desk. So I took my most favorite pages out of the sticker books and put them on a binder ring that’s hanging right next to my planner.
Of course no craft room tour would be complete without introducing you to my little helper. Irma is napping on my couch for hours (when she’s not playing with her kitty friends around the house) and she keeps me company while I create.
So this is my little crafty corner and my favorite tips to make it work on a budget. It’s not fancy but it’s still pretty and everything is perfectly organized. In the end of the day all that matters is having a space that keeps you happy and inspired and that your supplies are well organized and accessible anytime you want to create something.