I've been slowly renovating my studio, going from the horrible plastic storage drawers I've always had to the beautiful all-white Crop-In-Style Store-In-Style cubes. So many people have asked for pictures, so here goes:
My studio is in the basement of my home. I've designed it so that one wall is a half wall of cubes that looks over onto my daughter's playroom. I can keep an eye on her, yet the shelving keeps her out of my "toys".
I call this rounded shelf the "Jardin". I'm in love with paper flowers and I use them on a ton of projects. I had a number of flowers from Making Memories and Paper Source, but no cute bottles for them (and we all know how important packaging is!). However, IKEA sells these adorable condiment containers in their kitchen section. Attach a sample flower to the lid with a glue dot & you're ready to go!
All of my embellishments are stored in black & white boxes from IKEA (one insert inside an accessorizer cube allows me to store 4 boxes). If you're interested, they also come in pink & red! I organize my embellishments by theme, so I can quickly access my notions. For example, I'm currently finishing up my honeymoon scrapbook. When I work on the album, I only need to pull out the beach and travel boxes (rather than my old system of digging through boxes and bins trying to cull the appropriate stuff).
I used a two drawer cube (with dividers) to create 32 individual sections for chipboard & metal alphabets. Each letter of the alphabet (and numbers) has it's own section. It is so much easier for me to find what I'm looking for now!
My fiber & ribbon section is anchored by fibers on these fantastic vintage spools my friend Marirosa picked up on E-Bay (thanks M1!). I love having the mix of the old & the new.
My cardstock is stored (in ROYGBIV) in Cropper Hopper vertical paper holders. I have a cube filled with 12" x 12" and a cube filled with 8.5" x 11". I've been building my collection of these holders by hitting up AC Moore & Michaels with my handy dandy coupons every week. I've attached my Bazzill color wheel to the front of the middle paper holder with velcro, so I can pull it off as I need it.
My specialty patterned papers are stored in Cropper Hopper paper pouches inside the paper holders. I've divided them up according to vendor. Inside each paper pouch, plastic dividers are used to group papers by style. For example, in my Basic Grey pouches, I have dividers for Lollipop Shoppe, Motifica, etc. It makes it easy to keep my coordinating papers together.
My lesser known papers (for example, I don't have a lot of KI Memories) are divided in paper pouches by color. I also have paper holders for my 3+ years of Club Scrap papers and my paper scraps.
In total, I have 10 cubes filled with paper. I'm slowly buying doors for the cubes, so that I can close them and not be blinded by the excess!
Oh yeah... buttons. Lots o' buttons. I'm a sucker for those Foo Fa La button packs! That turquoise tin on the bottom shelf is crammed full of 7 Gypsies elastic bands. The cute French ceramic canister (from Ballard Designs) is filled with cotton balls. The large black clothespin (from The Container Store) is there because it just makes me smile. I'm looking for some ways to dress this section up a bit. Any ideas?
I'm going to continue building these shelves/cubes around my studio. It will eventually include a computer nook and a sewing nook. Next week I'm going to work on decorating and "artsying up" the existing cubes and labeling EVERYTHING.
Thanks for looking! It's kind of fun to share my hard work!
