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?

Art Supply Storage Ideas

  Okay, I’m an organizing junkie and I admit it.  It’s one of the few areas that I *think* I can control. Of course that is self delusional since I have more stuff than I’ll probably ever use in my life time.  Like most artists, I can’t help loving my tools and materials!

  So here are some more ideas for art supply storage:   

 

Magazine storage file

Specialty papers stored in magazine files -  I have papers I’ve made, collected and procured stored in cardboard magazine files.  They’re kept vertical this way and are easier to get at then if I had them stacked in some drawer.  I just leaf through the top corners and grab what I want.  This also saves drawer space since I have them stored on a book shelf, (the cardboard ones are pretty inexpensive, too).

Ink Pads- I store rubber stamp ink pads in old plastic cassette tape boxes that I found at Storables for cheap.  Who wants to play cassette tapes anymore?  These are perfect for storing ink pads! 
  There are fins inside the boxes to keep the cassette tapes in place and once in awhile I’ve had to cut a fin out to get one more ink pad in.  It’s simple to do that with an Xacto knife.  Now I have all of my favorite line of inks in one flip-top box that is great for taking with me to the beach, my backyard or to play with friends.  I have a couple of these boxes and marked which brands are in each box using a Krylon copper pen for quick identification.

Jewelry Findings, Beads, and Sequins -  I finally figured out a better way after a disaster on my Spring teaching tour with my whole collection of precious sequins.  I was using a ‘Craftables Locking Caddy’ to store my various colors of sequins in one nifty container…but I didn’t think about how my stuff would get bumped around when traveling to the East coast and back.  Boy, was I sad to find 20 colors of sequins splashed around the bottom of my Navigator, (nicknamed “Killer” because of how heavy it gets for me when I’m on these teaching tours).  Anyway, Killer had sequins everywhere. Being the kook that I am for color, it’s important to me that my sequins are stored by color so I don’t have to hunt for what I want. Otherwise a color “salad” might be okay – for someone else. Not me.  I about wrecked my hand sorting them all back out into their colors.
  That’s when I decided that a better solution to storing small things like this was required. I turned to WhimBead (www.whimbeads.com) for their lovely plastic boxes filled with flip-top boxes. I figured the extra protection of an outer box holding the individual sequin boxes would be a good thing.
   I’m not a genius – I use these same boxes to store all of my seed beads by color because again, I just want what I want, when I want it. I don’t have time to hunt through a salad of stuff to find what I want and when I’m working with seed beads, I work right out of the containers because I don’t have time to do it any other way.
   Now the brilliant part was applying this same solution to all of my jewelry findings! Ho ho! At last, a solution that makes sense for every application. I have marked the little flip-top boxes for plated gold, silver, sterling, and nickle jump rings, etc. so I can grab what I need immediately. When I pull out the plastic box holding all of the findings I know that everything I need is in there and don’t have to go digging around for crimp tubes or a different type of earring wire. It saves me time and makes making things so much simpler to do.

     Can you see the handprint on my forehead? Maybe I should have one tattooed there. =)

Portable Studio: Organizing Collage Papers

   I hit on this idea for organizing collage materials and I have to say that I haven’t found a better way yet.  It’s been about 3 yrs. since I started doing this.  I had been saving those great cellophane or plastic bags with the gummed flaps on them from things I’ve bought.  I kept thinking that there must be a good second use from these great bags. You know the ones – nice and clear, kind of flimsy but everything is being sold in these things now.  It finally occurred to me to use them to organize my collage papers.

Collage papers sorted into a bag.

  So I sorted my collage papers into color ways or by category (travel, ethnic, plain, patterned, etc.) and put them into these bags (no larger than 8.5″ x 11″).  Then I slide all the papers to one side and three hole punch the bag.  Off it goes into a notebook!  The smaller bags I use for scraps from previous sessions because I always end up with some that I hate to throw away. Those bags slide into a page protector in the notebook and I can “organize” the scraps by bag, too. I try to sort them by color but  I do have bags of “potpourri” scraps, too – not organized at all, just bagged.

  Now when I am mobile, say  meeting up with people to make stuff or going to the beach and I want to do some work there, I just grab the categories or color ways that I want to work with,  pop them into a notebook, grab a glue stick, some base paper/ poster board and clip board for a work surface and I’m off!  The papers won’t blow away, I can see what I have easily and often because the “pages” are clear, combinations of papers end up in juxtaposition and I find surprising things that way. Like fire engine red and lime – colors I would not have put together as the dominants in a piece but I might now!

  In the studio it’s a lot nicer to find what I want by browsing through the notebooks and pulling the pocket pages of what I feel like working with instead of being visually overwhelmed by scads and scads of mish-mash in front of me.  This has made collaging more approachable and definitely more productive for me.  Maybe this will help you, too!

Collage papers stored in a notebook.

Studio Re-organization, Part 2

    This is the new bank of drawers we put into my studio in place of a deep drawered dresser that was there.  I know it looks like a huge mess but that’s what re-organization looks like.  Not to mention, it’s pretty close to what the studio has been looking like for months now which prompted this re-organizing thing in the first place.

  A couple of things to keep in mind when going through this process is that for us visual, creative types out of sight means out of mind.  These drawers are just see-thru enough that it helps me to know what’s in them.  I have labels on the left side of each drawer but they don’t list everything in a drawer so the visual cue is just enough to flesh out the contents on the fly.

This picture is of trying out a configuration that I didn’t like very well.  It was visually confusing.  In the past, I’ve had Japanese Noren (door curtains) hang over this shelving unit so I wouldn’t have to look at the jumble of stuff in there.  That has worked for years but now it’s time for a change.  So Ken helped me last night put it together in a much more pleasing way – after all these years of subjecting him to all of those home dec shows on HGTV and stuff, he says “I wasn’t just watching those with you and drooling you know.”  =)  The next picture is the result of his fine sense and the aesthetic he has developed!

  Here you can really see how it came together. I have a weird passion for containers of certain types. Small luggage pieces, light train case repros, vintage boxes, antique boxes - that sort of thing.  Ken pulled them all together and arranged them for a nice visual.  Each one holds something specific: soldering kit, collage mediums like tea varnish, gold glaze, etc. and so on.  So each is very useful and pleasing to look at considering what all of these things look like sitting on a shelf un-contained. This works so much better and I can get all of the relative items by grabbing the one box and it’s already packed to take with me!  So it’s stored, portable and ready to travel. You gotta love that for efficiency.

  I re-hung my Hello Kitty Noren down below because it makes me laugh. Behind it are more drawers, of course. Sterlite makes stackable ones that are really deep. They’re stacked in twos across that shelf and hold bookbinding supplies, sales stuff, class samples, and even a ton of cookie cutters.  I still have more to do but a large part of this whole process is done.  Next post I’ll list what I’ve learned are good ways to organize a studio space. I’ve read a lot of books and of course, work with a lot of artists so have been able to distill some good pointers to share.  Have a great weekend!

About Reorganizing the Studio

  With things calming down to a dull roar and creating a small break from teaching, I’ve been able to turn to revamping the studio.  After all the travel teaching I’ve done and classes back here at home everything was everywhere…literally.  I have propane tanks in the dining room, an oven on the living room floor and more ridiculous decorating ideas (NOT!) going on here.  So it’s time to try and put it all back, right?  Oh what a laugh that causes me.

  Nope that wouldn’t do it at this point. What a mess I’ve made after almost two months on the road and then coming home and beginning classes again two days later. Okay so what to do? Rip the studio up of course! It was already pretty ripped up anyway so why not?   I’ve had these drawer units since January that I just haven’t had time to deal with. You know the drawer towers that have translucent drawers in them? I have about 5 of them here in all.

  Getting creative with storage resulted in taking a dresser out of the studio and putting most of those drawers in it’s place. The dresser ended up in the closet just outside of the studio so I still have that storage, too. Now I’m putting everything back into new places, labeling the drawers, etc.  The big goal is to get everything off the floor! I’ll post some pix of this process shortly.  I’ve figured out a lot about studio storage over the years and will share that, too.

See you next post!