Craft Room Chaos

As you can tell, I do a lot of projects around here. I'm pretty good about cleaning up the place where I did the project right away, but recently my craft room has gotten a little out of control. Refer to evidence #1:

The West Elm knock-off felt bins were overflowing. The craft table was a mess. Bottom line, it was a disaster and needed help. Since I've put myself on a spending freeze (the whole summer's off thing is great, except for the no paycheck aspect!) I didn't want to spend any money to organize the space. I was enthusiastic to get started, unlike my friend here:

I started by returning anything that does not belong here to its proper home. Then I cleared out the felt bins to see what fabric I had in there. Since I have two bins, I separated the fabric into two piles - stuff I've used before and stuff I have yet to use. I folded it all up and put it back in the bins. While I was emptying the bins, I found a bunch of piping and other types of fabric edging. Luckily, a few months ago, I bought an office organizer for $7 at Walmart and it has just sat empty, until now. I even made a cute little label for it:

 It worked out perfectly because it came with those dividers. I simply rolled up the edging and secured the rolls with twine that I had.

I tend to be a pack rat save anything that I think may eventually come in handy. For instance, I saved the cardboard that came in the package when we bought new sheets. A little weird, yes, but I knew that one day it was going to be useful! I have several photo mattes that needed to be corralled and they all fit perfect tucked into the cardboard. Unfortunately, the cardboard had seen better days. Probably before it was used in the packaging for a sheet set. Anyway. I grabbed a few pieces of scrapbook paper and Modge Podge.

Its been a long time since I've used Modge Podge and now I'm wondering why, because this stuff is great! I painted on a thin layer where the paper needed to lay and then put the paper in place. A few minutes later, I used the Modge Podge as a sealer so the paper would not tear as I was trying to access the photo mattes. I made another label, and voila!

Sorry the picture is so blurry, I'm obviously still trying to figure out this new camera.

Lastly, I took advantage of having a zillion vases/candle holders and used a few of them to hold my supply of ribbon. These few projects really cleaned up those shelves!

The rest of the organizing process was really just straightening up and putting things back where they belonged. The finished product is a pretty big improvement though:

There are still a few things I want to do in here, like cover an ugly bulletin board in fabric to make it prettier and hang it. The white walls and plain curtains are also starting to drive me batty, so they might get tackled soon. Luckily I have nothing but time to do more projects until school starts - well once this week's APPR training is over. I'll certainly keep you posted.

What type of organizing have you accomplished recently? Any free/easy ideas? Please share!

Thanks for reading,
Kathleen

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