Crafty Craft Area Organization

On a never ending quest to keep my crafting stash more organized, I came up with a few cheap organizational ideas that I thought might be helpful for someone out there. They've definitely been helpful for me, so far anyways!

I was having an issue with overbuying embellishments for scrapbooking, because I didn't really have them organized and would forget what I had. So I tried organizing them into various boxes, but that didn't really allow me to "see" what I had. I came up with the idea of putting them in Ziploc bags, which helped a lot but I still wanted an easy way to store them where I'd have easy access to them.

I had bought this cafe rod for another purpose, but never mounted it. I found these curtain rings on clearance for $0.50 a 6/pk (yeah, score!) and looking at the two together an idea popped into my head. The first thing I did was mount the rod to the side of my wooden craft island. It's in the garage, please pardon the mess.

Then I threaded the rings and used them to hold the Ziploc bags containing my scrapbooking stuff. Viola! All in one place, organized and easy to see what is there and grab just what I need. It's been awesome so far, and really easy to keep maintained.

Another "hot spot" of trouble was my stash of ribbon/trims. I had all of them crammed in a basket and would just rummage through them to find what I wanted to use. Time consuming, and I was also having the issue of overbuying because I wasn't remembering what I had.

My kids have an easel, and the roll that the paper came on is really sturdy, like seriously 100x's sturdier than any paper towel tube. So I rolled the various items around the tube and kept them secure with small elastic rubber bands that I stole took from my daughter's hair stuff. Now it's all easily stored and organized in one place.

I'm interested in hearing how you keep your crafting area organized on the cheap. What items have you repurposed to fit another need? How do you keep little items in check without buying sometimes expensive organizational tools? Please share your thoughts, I'd love to hear them!

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