My Stamping Space

As promised, my re-jigged stamping space.  It's still quite obviously jam-packed and cluttered looking, but everything is pretty well organised and located for ease of access and use.  Both these factors are much more important than how much space you actually have!  When I rearrange, my first thoughts are these:

How often do I use this?
Would I use it more if I could reach it easier?
What do I use so infrequently that I don't mind getting the step stool to access?
How can I group like items together to make it easy to remember where stuff is?
Is there enough space in the designated spot to cater for the inevitable growth in my stash?

This room is not especially big,  3.5 x 2.7 metres, and has no built ins. We added some "as is" Ikea shelves (black and red) and wall cupboards (beech) back when it was the home office, and they are quite functional for storing stamping gear.  Along the wall you can't see in these pics is my Expedit 4x4 cube bookcase, where all my cardstock and uni paperwork is stored.

The top pic shows just the corner of the trolley in a post down below a bit.  It essentially gives me a work surface on all four sides of the room, and that's a good thing, as I have a habit of covering every possible horizontal surface when I am working.  My tables, from my gorgeous antique Singer Sewing Machine stand with marble top (restored by my clever dad), glass top Ikea desk with trestle legs, expensive but so worth it Best Craft Organiser desk, cheapy officeworks glass top desks and another as-is Ikea office cabinet form a continuous surface around the 3 remaining walls of the room.  There's even enough space on the floor for an inflatable bed, imagine the crafty dreams you could have!

An assignment assessing the relative merits of science websites for teaching calls, but first I'm going to post a card made recently...

Craft Room organisation - Die-cutting heaven

I've been busy again re-arranging my craft room, to try and make it as friendly for my uni/teaching work as well as my stamping.  So far,  I think I have managed to improve both!

When I tidy up a bit (cos I've already messed it up doing some assignments), I'll take a pic of the new layout, but for now I wanted to show you my new solution for all my die-cutting gear that came about because of the room reshuffle.  This is a bit of an epic story, but I hope it explains my thinking process about my room, and how you might apply the same principles to better arranging your own space.

A few years back, I bought a butcher's trolley from Aldi, and this same trolley was in last Saturday's catalogue too, $149, so if you like the idea it would be worth giving your local Aldi's a call to see if they have any left.  It was tucked in a corner before, and held all manner of bits and bobs on the shelves underneath, as well as the drawers and providing a handy worksurface to boot. But, it wasn't exactly mobile, and I could only access the shelves from the front side.

As part of the room reshuffle, I wanted to get an inexpensive glass top desk to fill in a 'dead corner' where all my bags and totes were stored, the bags would still be underneath it and visible, but there would be a work surface over the top that would effectively extend my desk into a U shape around three sides of the room..  At Officeworks, I found a glass desk that fitted the bill, just $55, but when I went to get it, I spied another variant, with twice the surface area, designed as a corner desk but able to be assembled as two individual desks as well.  At $68, it was a bit of a no-brainer to get that instead.    Because of this unexpected extra surface, something had to give, so I stripped the butcher's trolley bare and had it in the centre of the room waiting to be moved elsewhere.  While preparing for my Stampin' Crop day last Friday, I moved the various equipment onto the trolley to wheel it out and it dawned upon me that I could  free up quite a few of the cubes in my Ikea Expedit bookcase by having all my big shot, sizzix and other die cutting stuff stored on the butcher's trolley itself.  It also occurred to me that it would save a bit of setup time for my Stampin' Crops - just wheel the fully laden trolley out, ta da!  While not in use, it lives against my Expedit, and provides a work surface for my uni/teaching stuff, since the Big Shot fits underneath on the racks.

Phew!  Did you get that far?  Can you picture what I've done yet?
Here's the trolley:

On the bottom shelf are my Sizzix original dies and embossing folders, alphabets etc, and on the upper shelf are my gorgeous Stampin' Up! die storage boxes - a very neat fit for 2 x medium and 2 x large boxes.  In the drawers I have all the cutting plates and shims and my spare trimmer etc - things I use on the work surface.

Hope you find it inspiring, check back in a day or two to see the rest of my revamped space!