New Organizing the Studio Ideas

 Storing rubber stamps and stamp pads can be a challenge.  I always want to see what I have and be able to grab it when I want.  I want it to be easy to put things back so that I will (HA!), too.  So here are some ideas for you:

Rubber Stamp Ink Pads:   Store stamp pads in boxes made for cassette tapes.  The slots are the right size and you can find the old wooden boxes at the thrift store inexpensively.

I recently heard about storing the ink pads upside down so that the ink doesn’t settle to the bottom.

Also another thought is to store the pads by color (not all blues are the same, etc.)  or manufacturer – depending on what works best for you. 

Rubber Stamps, unmounted: 

1.  Store unmounted stamps in CD jewel cases so you can categorize them easily.  Then it’s a simple matter of storing the CD cases in a CD rack.  I put in paper inserts so that the spine tells me what category is inside.  This saves a lot of drawer space!

2.  Another method is to apply Aleene’s Tak-it to the back of each unmounted stamp and let it dry.  Stick the stamps onto page protectors or heavy plastic pages that can then be stored in notebooks  on a shelf, sorted by category.  How handy is that?

Hello BeadFest Santa Fe and Miami!

  What a wildly great time I had on this teaching tour.  I met a lot of fantastic artists and saw so many great places.  Best of all, people were excited with what they learned in my classes and that is most of the fun for me!

  In Santa Fe I got to see my friends KLEW, Tory Hughes and Larkin Van Horn more than I have in awhile so this was lovely.
   My husband and I saw some great exhibits  including exceptional pieces at Blue Rain Gallery (Preston Singletary and Tammy Garcia) and the Santa Fe Museum (Gustav Baumann exhibit).  I especially loved the “Waiting For Baumann” display by Ligia Bouton. It was amazing!  I’ll post more about this trip shortly.