Wet Rainy Fridays always get me down

Especially when the radio keeps going out. I was going to blog about my office again today, but the going is slow. So I'm going to talk about organization. You can't create if you don't know where things are. You get an idea and before you know it you're sidetracked on finding that thing you needed and then you find something else and put it away and oh yeah, what was I doing?

Right now I'm going through piles of beads and leftover wire, organizing and putting them away in their rightful spots. I do have an incredibly organized bead system. I bought a fabulous shallow drawer cabinet from Ikea and several small bit screw/nail/bolt organizers from Kmart. My glass beads are in the drawers and the organizers from Kmart hold my semi-precious beads and some unique seed beads, the rest going into smaller boxes sorted by size that i got at Walmart. My findings are organized into boxes from Harbor Freight and sit in a plastic drawer setup that you can find in almost any store - Staples, Walmart, Kmart, etc. My precious metals are locked up in a safe - well, no, not really but I should. They are actually sorted in plastic sleeves in a 3 ring binder - no lie, it works. Copper goes into a plastic hanging file folder bin because there's a lot more of that, and the silver/gold filled just won't fit in there. Tools are on this nifty little recycled thingy that my husband made for me - he took a couple of leftover things that wire came on at his job, soldered them together and I place it on a lazy susan and organize all my tools/pliers/hammers and anything else I can hang off of it. Its taken years but everything has a place.

The Ikea organizer, the tool organizer and my seed beads!

One of the neatest things I have ever received to organize projects is a fabric/quilted roll up with plastic baggies inside and each project gets its own baggie. It's held up rather well for several years now, much to my surprise. I received it as part of a birthday package when I was doing Swap-bot. I miss the days of swap-bot - look it up on swap-bot.com. It's kind of difficulty to explain, but crafty/arty people seek to swap things through the mail from all over the world. There are swaps for even non arty things like Tea Swaps - flattened penny swaps (i have quite the collection) - napkin swaps (for those of us who like to collect pretty patterned things) - and even photo swaps.

Project organizer shown Closed and Opened!