Part of the fun of being a crafter is shopping for and “collecting” the various tools and elements that go into the making of our works of heART.  To be honest, I’m pretty sure I spend more time looking online and shopping in stores for my craft supplies than I actually do crafting! And nothing is more frustrating than discovering you’ve managed to bring home something you’ve previously purchased – or, not being able to find something you’ve previously purchased and having to buy a duplicate (knowing the one you’ve been searching high and low for will “magically” appear as soon as you’ve begun to use the replacement – especially if it’s something that’s non-returnable!!!).

I’m also a sucker for the $1 spots at Michael’s and Joann’s and anything that has a clearance sticker attached to it. There’s so much hoarded crafty goodness crammed stashed in my craft room that there’s just no way I could keep up with what’s-what and where, so I decided to create an inventory binder to help me with that.

There are a ton of ways to create a binder. I did a Google search and came across a few ideas to pass along:

This is a list of files created by one of the “Queen’s” of scrapbook organization, “Rockester” (a/k/a Kathy Aho), of Scrapper’s Challenge.

Here is another amazing resource for pages to put in a binder from Kathleen Driggers of Kat’s Scrappy, Bloggy Life.

The first thing I did was to come up with a list of the basic categories I wanted to include in the binder. From this, I was able to decide on any sub-categories I wanted to include. I’ll warn you upfront, I’m pretty anal OCD when it comes to organizing – you wouldn’t have to go to the lengths I did to create something that will fit your needs. For instance, the binder I originally purchased for this project ended up being too small, so I switched to a larger size. You might want to create something smaller that would be easy to take with you on shopping trips or could even fit in your purse.

Here is the list in my “Table of Contents” – created using Avery dividers purchased at Staples:

• Cricut Font Samples (list found here)
• Dies
• Embossing Folders
• Inks/Stickles (here and here)
• Punches
• Scissors
• Sew Easy/Stitch’z
• Stamps – Alpha Sets
• Stamps – Backgrounds/Borders/Fourishes
• Stamps – Baby/Birthday/Celebrate
• Stamps – Flowers/Bugs/Animals
• Stamps – Friends
• Stamps – Get Well/Sympathy
• Stamps – Journaling
• Stamps – Love/Wedding/Anniversary
• Stamps – Miscellaneous
• Stamps – Phrase Sets
• Stamps – Tags/Frames
• Stamps – Thank You/Thinking of You
• Stamps – Through the Year/School
• Spellbinder’s List (found here)

I’m not going to kid you, this took a some time to compile. Instead of just listing out the various items in this list, I opted to cut or stamp a sample of each item. Since I decided to stamp my images in black ink onto white cardstock (sold in the office supply section of Walmart), I used black cardstock to cut my dies and punches, and samples of my embossing folders. I am so “visual” when it comes to learning or trying to figure out what would look best on a project, I knew I would like the ability to refer to the actual images, shapes, dimensions, etc. I also used my handy dandy P-Touch label machine to help me keep up with who-made-what!

I also came up with a system of marking where each item is stored, but I’ll spare you that part of the process for now!

As always, we’d love to see what you’ve come up with to go along with this topic! If you have any comments or questions, I hope you’ll post them below, or shoot me an email at djweeaks@att.net.

~ Doris