organized craft supplies

When we moved last summer I purged most of my craft supplies.  Rather than pack up a bunch of stuff I hadn’t used in years, I sold most of my crafty things at a yard sale.  Once we moved into the new house the few craft supplies I had left got stashed into a kitchen cabinet along with the kids’ school supplies.

As you can see there was never any rhyme or reason to the chaos in this cabinet.  It was a hot mess and was in desperate need of a little organization.

Today I’m sharing how I whipped this little cabinet into shape.  Here’s a step-by-step of my typical organizing process.

As with most others, this organization project started with a good cleaning.  I cleared every. single. thing. out of this cabinet and sorted it all into two piles: keep and discard.  (Why we had 5 dried out glue sticks in here is beyond me?)

Next I grouped all of the “keep” stuff into categories: school, craft/art, jewelry making, yarn/fabric, scrapbooking, gift wrapping plus a little pile of miscellaneous odds and ends.

Then once I could see how much stuff I had in each category it was easy to figure out how I wanted to store things.  I chose to use boxes which make grabbing everything needed for a particular project all at once really simple.

This way when I want to, say, wrap a gift, I just pull out the gift wrap box and everything needed to wrap or bag a gift is inside.  This new system is so much better than what we had going on in here before.

These colorful, heavy-duty, cardboard boxes were a recent Hobby Lobby find.  The silver side handles make these stackable boxes operate more like drawers which is perfect for this under counter cabinet.

The last thing I did was to label each box, making it near impossible for the kids to have to ask me to help them find something.  At least that is the point of the labeling in theory.  In reality everyone always asks mom…….no matter what, huh?

Have you done any organizing lately?  As much as I love big organization projects, the smaller ones often bring the most satisfaction.  At least they do for me.