Organization of Scrapping supplies

For those of you that may not be familiar, there is a company called The Scraprack.  Tiffany Spaulding is the owner / inventor / organizer extraordinaire. She came up with an organizational system for your scrapbook supplies that not only stores your items, but her system promises you can find anything you are looking for in less than 5 minutes.  Now how cool is that! 

Of course I did not buy into her system for years.  I would see her at scrapbook expos and walk on by.  I have a great system going.  Why would I spend all the money and time to start over!!!

Boy, was I wrong.  Her system really does work.  I have seen the light and am now a True Believer!!!

First let me share how my things were organized.

Mind you these photos are a little old.  I think they were taken in 2011. But doesn't this look great?  See all those drawers to the left?  I have tools, chipboard pieces, alphabets, some card making supplies, different inks and embossing powders, etc... stored in these drawers.  Doesn't it look all neat and tidy?  Now in the center, below the counter, is paper.  The rack on the left is all Close To My Heart and on the right is all Stampin' Up!. I not only have cardstock, but also background paper or DSP as Stampin Up calls it, , page kits, etc...  Look up and see the wall to wall cabinets.  ALL PAPER!  Different Brands, tons of page kits, paper pads, solid cardstock.  These cabinets are filled left to right with just paper.


Then this is the part of the room I spent most of my time,  I sit in the corner area and had everything in arm's reach.  The photo is a little small but I will try to explain how I stored things.  See over the tissue box in the bottom left? I have tons of the Iris clam boxes.  I stored page kits, class projects, half finished layouts, seasonal items that only got used once a year, along with just random paper in these.  To the right on the floor I had some themed paper in Cropper Hopper Paper holders.   I think these had all Disney stuff in them.  Next is my box of scrap paper.  Keep going toward the right and you see the plastic drawers.  These are color coded with all types of embellishments, brads, buttons, fibers, bling, etc...   Up on the top shelves are shoe boxes with just ribbon/fabric/fiber scraps.  Again stored by color.



 



This is just showing one of the corners in my room.  The spinner on the floor is by Clip-It-Up. I adjusted it to be able to add three layers and this had tons of stickers and other embellishments.  There is another spinner on the counter with Close To My Heart acylic stamp sets.  And then the paper racks on the walls were from a store going out of business.  These stored the current line of Stampin Up card stock.









So this was how everything was stored in my scrap room.  All was and actually still is neat and tidy and many things tucked away so you didn't have to see them.

The problem was, if I sat down and wanted to work on some football photos of my son.  I would have to go through 15 feet of paper to find football themed paper.  Sift through tons of embellishments to find football stuff, open drawer after drawer to find the right brads, fibers, chipboard, etc to put one layout together.  It was exhausting just thinking about starting a layout so, instead, I would just sit in my room and soak in how much I loved this room.  But did not get any projects done.

Then, I started subscribing to Tiffany's free organization webinars.  These would be weekly and broke down different items to work on for that week.  it might be paper one week, next week embellishments, etc...  You can learn about these on her website www.thescraprack.com   this would be a good time bcause I new series of the webinars just started up this week.  Anyway, the first time I signed on, I would watch and listen to her weekly webinar show and I just was not "getting it".  Why on earth would I want to pull out EVERYTHING and re-organize it. 

I listened to the whole series. But didn't really give it a try. That was last fall's series.  Then I signed up again for last Winter's series and it started to make sense to me.  So I started with paper.  I only did about 5 - 7 inches of paper at a time, but I would pull out paper and look at it.  Do I still like it?  Will I use it?  If not, is it worth trying sell? Donate? or just Toss? I even did this to the pads of paper.  There are some papers I LOVE and others I knew I would never use so I started tearing out the paper I knew I would never even think of using.  (There was more than I thought)

By the time the Spring session started I had purged about 32 inches of paper.  And I had sorted the  paper that I liked into her method of Themes.  Now if I wanted to find a piece of football paper it only took me a minute or two, as opposed to hours.  Hey, She may have something here!!!

By the time the Spring Session started I was hooked!  And to top it all off, I was one of tghe few chosen to work at The Scraprack Booth at Creating Keepsakes Convention in Manchester.  I had the option of working for pay or work for products.  Of course I was working towards getting my own Scraprack System that Tiffany designed. Plus I got to meet this amazing woman in person.  She is so warm-hearted.  Just the nicest person.  So, I placed my order and could not wait for my new system to arrive.

I know this is turning into a novel so I will end it for now... but check out my next post to see how things continued.

Sharon


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