My main hobby for going on two years now has been scrapbooking, but over the past year it feels like my main hobby has become organizing my scrapbooking supplies. After a year of scrapbooking and two moves, my stuff was a mess and split across many small piles. I used what I could find and would occasionally find piles of things I’d lost.
Over the course of a year, I have tried about three separate times to unify it all into one accessible system – something that would allow me to find and use everything I have and help me mix products from different brands. I currently have everything in one place and can find things by color or theme rather than brand – and it has helped me enjoy scrapbooking more and be more productive. However, as I’m transitioning from nearly entirely pocket scrapbooking to mostly 12x12 traditional layouts, I need to make my system keep up with my changing needs and avoid getting too much stuff for the space I have.
My greatest fear (for scrapbooking) is to have piles and piles of stuff that’s a decade old and that I don’t like anymore. It would represent a waste of space, time, energy, and money. Instead, I have a vision of having products I love at my fingertips – and spending an amount of time and money shopping that doesn’t increase my stash. My focus this year is figuring out what I love to use while figuring out the best ways to store those things.
I’m going to start with how I scrapbook and how that influences my storage system, then describe my current system and inventory in detail, then talk about my plans for changing that over the next six months or so.
Questions
The first step towards having a plan for organizing my supplies is thinking about how I use them. To be practical, the plan needs to take into account where and when I scrapbook, what formats I use, and what supplies I have.
When and Where
For me, I scrap nearly entirely at home and go to a crop maybe once a year: portability is not a priority for me. I scrap nearly everyday, so I leave everything set up between sessions – I don’t need to put everything away between pages. For my craft area, I have about a quarter of the living room, not a separate room. This means I do need to be able to put everything away so it looks neat when company is coming.
How
All of my layouts go in 12x12 binders. I don’t do minialbums or traveler’s notebooks because they’re inefficient uses of my kallax album storage. I do use 6x8, 6x12, and 8.5x11 inserts in my 12x12 albums. I’m currently in the process of transitioning from nearly entirely pocket scrapbooking to nearly entirely 12x12 traditional layouts. This affects what embellishments I use (especially the size), how many project life style cards I use per layout, and how much 12x12 paper I use. Because this is a recent change, I have too much stuff for pocket pages and not enough larger embellishments appropriate to 12x12 layouts.
My storage system has to take into account that I have 3x4 and 4x6 cards now, but I expect that population to decrease. And it should help me use them in “non-traditional” ways on traditional layouts. It also has to be fairly flexible because I’m going to be figuring out both what I use now and how I want to look for it.
What
For scale, I have about 12 inches of 12x12 and 8x8 paper (combined) and about 4 12x12 storage binders of project life cards and embellishments. This means I don’t need to separate between the current index of supplies and a “backstock” of copies; all of my supplies can go together. This is not a lot for many people, but it’s too much for the space I have.
I also have tools, but not very many – one punch, 8 ink pads, a dozen stamps, 2 pairs of scissors, one set of colored pencils. These all live on a pegboard on the wall, and I mostly won’t talk about them because there’s so little that just putting it in bins on the pegboard is totally sufficient without any real system. I’m going to wait until I have too much to easily arrange on the pegboard to decide what to do about tools.
Current Storage
Let’s start with my containers. I have three plastic files for paper and a Totally Tiffany Craft Binder for everything else. In addition, I have three “spare” 12x12 albums – one for pocket pages and page protectors, one for spare scraprack pages, and one for overflow from the craft binder.
The “craft binder” is like three 12x12 binders combined into one big zippered cover; for those of you familiar with the scraprack, this is the portable three spinder version. The craft binder is full of scraprack pocket pages that are designed to hold supplies; they’re like project life pocket pages, but with roomier pockets and a flap cut out of the top of each one.
I use the scraprack because I love having things neatly organized and I hate digging through piles. Die cuts get bent and damaged and lost in piles; they’re safe and clean and findable in the scraprack pages. When I flip through, I get a tour of everything I own, and I can put my hands on anything I want for a page in seconds. Besides buying her products, I also follow Totally Tiffany’s four section system. It changed my life. I can sort my supplies quickly, put them away, and find them again. It works when I want to find a specific thing I know I have and when I want to browse to see what might work on a page. My organizing went from direction-less to focused as I watched her youtube videos (the Get Organized Challenge) and figured out how to make things work for me.
The four sections of the system are: themes, calendar, alphanumeric and the rainbow. Themes are different things you scrapbook about (different for every person) – some of mine include books, celebrations, friends, and food. Calendar is similar to themes, but all the themes are seasons – spring, summer, fall, winter – and the holidays that go in those seasons. I also put weather and other time themes (times of day, days of week) in that section. Alphanumeric is all the number and letter stickers, plus words that don’t belong anywhere else. Rainbow is everything that doesn’t belong in a theme, organized by color (metallic, gray, brown, white, black, multicolor, ROYGBIV).
My rainbow actually starts with yellow (YORVBG), because yellow-orange-red felt like going light-to-dark, which was how I was trying to arrange things within a section. I have since learned to bucket things into broad color categories, sort by size, and then arrange in the scraprack pages smallest-to-largest. This both makes loading the pages easier (different pages have different sized pockets) and helps me see the actually eligible elements for a page. If I want something orange, I probably know whether I’m looking for a sticker or a 3x4 card, so I should have those two things separated.
That ordering (themes, calendar, alphanumeric, rainbow) is also the order I consider places to put something away. If it fits a theme (or calendar theme), that’s where it goes. If it’s a letter/number set, it goes in alphanumeric. Everything else goes in the rainbow.
I spent a solid 8-10 months working this system out by watching Tiffany’s youtube videos (the Get Organized Challenge series) and thinking, but now that I’ve got all this stuff organized, I’m spending a ton of time thinking about what it is that I’m storing. My change of format from pocket pages to 12x12 has made a bit impact on what supplies I use most, and what I plan to buy in the future.
Paper
I have 12x12 paper, 8x8 paper, 6x6 paper, and paper scraps. The 12x12 and 8x8 paper lives in plastic Totally Tiffany “fab” files (plus some overflow); I have one 8x8 and two 12x12 fab files. (I wish I’d bought the 12x12 paper handlers instead – it’s really annoying to open and close the fab files and they’re much narrower than I expected.) The 6x6 paper and paper scraps live in the scraprack. About a third to a half of my paper is neutral (gray, brown, black, white) and the other half is various colors.
The move from pockets to full pages has had the most dramatic effect on my paper usage (and stash). About 90% of my 12x12 paper was purchased in May – over two in-person shopping trips; a solid 60-80% of my 6x6 and all of my 8x8 paper has been purchased over the same period. I think you can guess that I’m feeling concerned about how quickly I purchased paper – it’s going to take a lot of layouts to use 12” of paper.
I am not claiming that I did not get a good deal: this paper was all purchased at Joann’s on a 40%+ discount or at Tuesday Morning. It nearly all came in pads, and I thought hard about which ones to get. Some of them I’m really happy with – a pad of “navy florals” and one that had a bunch of watercolor prints in particular. But others I regret.
When I was at Joann’s, going on a shopping spree spurred on by the sale and the novelty of shopping in-person, I pulled out a whole pile of pads of paper and then wittled them down to “just” 5 – three of which shared an aqua-yellow-pink color scheme. Youtube stars love those combos! They’re in style! These papers all work so well together, across the collections! It was easy to sell myself on buying not one, but all three of those pads.
ver the course of a year, I have tried about three separate times to unify it all into one accessible system – something that would allow me to find and use everything I have and help me mix products from different brands. I currently have everything in one place and can find things by color or theme rather than brand – and it has helped me enjoy scrapbooking more and be more productive. However, as I’m transitioning from nearly entirely pocket scrapbooking to mostly 12x12 traditional layouts, I need to make my system keep up with my changing needs and avoid getting too much stuff for the space I have.
My greatest fear (for scrapbooking) is to have piles and piles of stuff that’s a decade old and that I don’t like anymore. It would represent a waste of space, time, energy, and money. Instead, I have a vision of having products I love at my fingertips – and spending an amount of time and money shopping that doesn’t increase my stash. My focus this year is figuring out what I love to use while figuring out the best ways to store those things.
I’m going to start with how I scrapbook and how that influences my storage system, then describe my current system and inventory in detail, then talk about my plans for changing that over the next six months or so.
Cards
The opposite of sheets of paper is project life cards. Or at least, their usability in my stash seems to be on opposite trajectories. As I move into traditional layouts, I only use one or two cards at most on a layout; previously, I often used at least 8 (3x4) cards per week for project life.
All of my cards live in my craft binder or my themes binder. Because project life cards (that I buy) tend to be unthemed, they’re mostly in the rainbow. Many of Ali Edward’s (my favorite brand) sets have a lot of text of them, so they have more of a tendency to end up in themes.
Even though I only bought one core set (Midnight), and that was two years ago, the majority of my cards are still from that one kit. They’re neutral in color, so I can still use them, but there’s just a lot of them – and they have rounded corners. My current plan is to give myself a year to learn how I use the cards on my new layouts (and how much pocket scrapping I still do) before I do any major purging of cards.
Over the next 6 months, I’m going to put a special effort into using cards on my layouts so that I get in the habit of using what I have so much of. One thing I’ve noticed already is that it’s easier for me to use 4x6 cards now than it was in project life – where I felt the loss of that slot for a bigger photo. I’m looking forward to trying out a grid layout to use some of my tiny stock of 4x4 and 3x3 cards – I don’t have pocket pages with pockets that size, so I don’t think I’ve used any of them in the six months I’ve had them.
The other option for using cards is to consider them as scraps of pattern paper. This means using them as layers or punching shapes out of them. I’ve been making pretty good use of the two punches I have (1” and 2” circles) on 6x6 paper, but don’t tend to think of punching shapes from cards.
Stickers and Die cuts and Sequins
We’ve covered sheets of paper and PL cards, and I’m going to group essentially all of my other supplies under embellishments. This includes die cuts, stickers, letter stickers, enamel dots, sequins, and (narrow) washi. These are all stored in my craft binder and themes binder.
Here is a page of embellishments from my craft binder (from the pink section). You can see that I store die cuts and stickers together in the same pocket. I stick them to wax paper stuck to cardstock; this basically forms homemade custom-sized sticker sheets. I take all the pieces that are the same color from die cut packs and sticker sheets (that don’t fit some theme) and put them on cards in my rainbow section.
Applying adhesive (permanent or repositionable) to die cuts turns them into stickers, and then I don’t have to deal with the die cuts hiding behind each other or falling out of the pockets. The chipboard stickers don’t take being repositioned well; they tend to delaminate. This isn’t much of a problem as long as I only move them once (from the storage sheet to the page) and don’t lose multiple layers reorganizing my storage system. Stickers become somewhat less sticky by being stored on waxed paper, but most of them don’t require additional adhesive when I use them.
I’ve recently reorganized my rainbow section to put all of the smaller embellishments before all of the PL cards. Before, they were mixed in together. Usually, I know whether I want something big like a card or something smaller, so separating them on different pages makes my search quicker.
Future Changes
The change I’m most eager for is to get my themed supplies back into my craft binder. In order to make room for them, I need to purge or use a full spinder of supplies from my neutral and rainbow sections. I’ve made a couple passes through lately without removing all that much, but I also haven’t been being that brutal – I’m afraid I’ll start liking something I got rid of!
I’m going to continue paying attention to what color combinations I enjoy using on pages, and keep those colors in mind when I’m shopping. So far, I’ve learned to: Avoid pastel paper and instead pick mid to dark tones Look for small, plain patterns rather than eye-catching ones. Avoid 12x12 sheets with metallic foils; they’re too loud.
I enjoyed the camera and butterfly boldly patterned paper I bought because it was pretty easy to have my Brother Scan-n-Cut cut out all the individual shapes – I now have a lot of aqua cameras. It’s both cheap and easy to get die cuts this way, but I’m not sure how many patterned papers will actually be suitable for this treatment.
I should not buy more washi tape because I don’t use it (except as a tool for guests to mark their glasses at parties). But do I not use it because I don’t have enough? This feels like an eternal question – if I don’t use a supply, do I not like it or do I not have enough to use it properly?
I want more plain cardstock in white, black, and navy because it makes good, quiet backgrounds and photo mats. I’ve already used up my entire pack of black cardstock from May.
It’s so easy to come up with more things I want to buy, but I also want to have less stuff! This feels like an endless cycle. But I am succeeding in organizing what I have and getting to use the stuff I want to use, so things are getting better over time.
But I regard that as a mistake, in retrospect. I wish I had remembered that I am at the beginning of a new phase of my scrapbooking evolution and that I don’t yet know what my favorite color palette for 12x12 layouts is (or how busy I like my papers). In this situation, I should have optimized for diversity – different colors, different shades, different styles. I adore most or all of the two other pads I chose that day, but I don’t love the aqua-yellow-pink ones. The paper is pretty, but the colors are nearly all light, and I do not like the pages I make with only these papers.
I love contrast, bold colors, jewel tones – my least favorite colors are pastels, especially en-mass. It’s predictable that a pile of pale paper is tough for me, and while I’ve salvaged it a bit by adding in black and navy cardstock, I still don’t love any of those layouts. Mixing in just a little of this paper doesn’t hurt layouts, but it’s going to be in my stash for a long time at this rate. It feels sad to know that nearly all of this paper is likely to be purged some day when it currently represents half of the 12x12 paper I’ve purchased (and I do love the other half of what I’ve picked).
On my second shopping trip, I knew that I had made a mistake the first time. I revised my paper parameters to include not just “pretty”, but the right colors. I’m looking for dark teals, mustards, fuschias, navies, dark browns, and maroons.
The next time I plan to buy scrapbooking supplies is black friday. I need to avoid buying paper until then so that I have maximum room for new stuff when it’s most on sale. This goal does double duty – in addition to being a good way to get a good deal (at major sales), it gives me a concrete reason not to spend a bunch of time shopping and to use up what I have. And a built-in reward – the promised black friday shopping spree. Another one-time shopping trip is risky because I’ll only know/remember so much about my tastes at the time, and won’t be able to work in new learnings over time. The advantage of buying a little at a time is the ability to course-correct. I think the advantages of not buying as much stuff (since I’m trying not to grow my stash) is probably the dominant factor currently.
Thanks to Dan Luu for editing.