Today I wanted to share a tour of my Studio. The room is off of my kitchen with French doors that lead out to the garden. It isn’t very large but it is perfect because I have a little bit of a lot of stuff and I can keep it somewhat organized.

I love using thrifted items as you can see in photo above. On the desk to the left is an old metal biscuit tin that holds my larger stencils and thicker chipboard sheets. The chair was a garage sale find for $5. The shelves are all new and either from Ikea {wood ones} or Elfa Shelves from The Container Store.The plastic bins on the top shelves hold supplies for either Scrapbooking, Upcycling or Altered Art. The small Tilt Bins were purchased from a local scrapbooking store that was closing. On the opposite wall are my 49 Junk Drawers which you can see in the last photo HERE. I bought these at my very first estate sale.
This vintage red and cream cart was from another estate sale. It holds my thin dies, paper cutter, Fabi BigShot and Vagabond die cutting machines. Yup, that’s Tim’s autograph on my Vagabond… love!

To organize my thin dies I bought Avery/Elle pocket folders. I cut magnetic sheets into 5″ x 7″ pieces {I used an Xacto knife on the magnetic sheet so it wouldn’t damage my paper cutter} and organized my dies according to similar shapes. These fit perfectly into some old wooden drawers that I thrifted.
I splurged and bought drawers from Go-Organize. Then I purged a lot of my supplies and organized my paper stash into four groups. The drawer closest to my working area holds solid colored cardstock. The other top drawer holds my three favorite manufacturers; Basic Grey, October Afternoon and Cosmo Cricket {unfortunately two have ceased selling papers so I tend to hoard their stash}. The bottom drawers are organized by patterned colored paper and then themes.

I also have Alex drawers from Ikea. These hold larger groups of things like washi tape, adhesives and ink pads. The nice things is that this can also be rolled out to use as an extra work surface.

To the left of my work surface is a tall cabinet which has several pull-out drawers. These hold most of my Bigz dies, Embossing folders, embellishments and sewing supplies.

A special benefit that I discovered while organizing my Studio was that I found lots of loose photos and memorabilia that needed to be organized. I set up a filing system where I separated everything by Year. This didn’t take much time and I can sort through them better when I am ready to organize individual years. It felt great to purge and sort everything.

I did this reorganizing in 2015. I sort of promised not to buy more Stuff until I used more of what I had. Since then I have almost completed an entire scrapbook, made several projects for work samples and recently started a Planner project. My excuse for actually buying more Stuff is, well, is that “I was working at the Scrapbook Expo a few months ago and you can’t let me loose in an Expo without expecting me to buy something!” That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Thank you for reading through this long post. I hope you enjoyed the tour. Please Follow my site by clicking on the blue Follow button on the top right of my post or subscribe via email to keep up with my crafty adventures.

This is Linked to:
Life on Lakeshore Drive, Pieced Pastimes, Scrapality, The Answer is Chocolate, Too Much Time on My Hands and USS Crafty