Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Organization, Part 2


I use this 3 drawer plastic storage container to store my patterned paper scraps.  It's nice because it stores them flat, but I feel like scraps get put in these drawers and unless they are on top they will never be seen again.  Sometimes I'm looking for a specific patterned paper (wondering if I have any more) and I get very frustrated trying to find what I'm looking for.


This is an open drawer before I re-organized.  You can see that there's lots of paper in there, but who knows what's on the bottom?

My idea was to take out everything in each drawer, find all of the pieces that belong together, clip them together and then cut a small piece to put on an index page.  Then when I open the drawer I can look at the index page to look for a specific paper, and if it's in the drawer all of the little bits and pieces will be in one spot.  Here's picture of several pieces of one pattern clipped together:


They don't always have a coordinating paper clip but in this case it just worked out that way!  You can see that I have several different sizes of paper, but now I know that's all I have or that specific paper.

Here's the index page I made for one of the drawers:


The clippings are different shapes and sizes - I tried to cut off wierd ends or pieces that were not useful.  It would probably be nice to have nice, square pieces, but this works.  In some cases the paper is double sided so I tried to fold a corner up so that both sides show.

Here's an organized drawer with the index page on top:


When I started this project there are a few things I didn't realize:
1.  how many patterned paper scraps I have!
2.  how incredibly putzy this project would be!

I think it will be worth the effort though - it sure feels good to be organized!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

WOW!! It must be nice to be so organized!! Great job.