Welcome to Frugal Fridays week #5- organizing

Well this week I will tell you about organizing all your scrapbooking supplies into one big book. Depending on how much you have will depend on how long this will take you to do, but once it's done it is so beneficial later on. So I suggest to start now and add to the book as you accumulate more (which is a good possibility). I took a large 3 ring binder and seperated it into sections with a piece of cardstock cover with some bright colored papers that I had laying around and labeled them.

My first section is labeled "Mediums" which include inks, chalks, sprays, glitters, special markers. On white cardstock I stamped (using an old eraser) all the inks that I have and wrote underneath them the color and brand name and put them in a color order as best as I could, which I filled 3 pages of colors. I did the same with my embossing powders. stickles, glitter glues, glimmer mists (I used a paper towel roll cut short and just sprayed a small circle of the mists on cardstock) and just some of my chalks- since I had so many.

The next section in for my Punches/Scissors/Templates which was easy to do just used some scrap cardstock and punch 1 of every punch you have and I haven't got around to it yet, but you could write down the brand name  underneath each one for future reference. Also in this section I have my decorative scissor edgers, again just cut some scraps,  templates I just traced onto the cardstock and labeled them  and I did little squares for my textured templates and wrote right on top of them the name (like woodgrain, waves etc,)

Now this next section" STAMPS" took me a very long time, but I had over 2000 stamps...I tried to put them into catagories such as flowers, baby, butterflies, holidays, pets, sports, borders, words, sayings, wedding, individual sets, and alphabets. With the alphabets I only did A B C and wrote all the info about this set down, And as far as a collection of stamp sets -as you can see on the left side I wrote the name of the set down and a brief description of what is in this set and how many stamps. I then placed these acrylic stamps into cd cases into the same catagories that I stamped them in this book. All my rubber stamps are in another drawer and my complete sets are in another large drawer.

 So now when I'm doing a layout, card or altered project and I'm thinking about some stamp, but not sure what I have- I just grab my big book and look thru  by catagory(flower,holiday etc) find it and I know where to go get it. Sounds a little complicated...but it works really well for me and my friends that come over to my scraproom. They have no idea of what I have until they look thru my book and see what they might be able to use.

Another section I have is a list of all my TOOLS/supplies and Embellishments... which of course you can't show them on paper, so its just nice to have a list to remind myself and others what is available in my scraproom. And of course the best section is a list of all the Cricut cartridges I have (which I'm adding to that list all the time) which I will be showing you how I organize them in weeks to come. So now that I have this book completed it has been a life saver some times and I just love to be organized. I did this book this past winter when it was cold outside and I had a few days to work on it, but you could start now and do it at your leisure, you'll surprise yourself with all the items you didn't even know you had or forgot about. Happy organizing....Debbie