QuicKutz CHA July release

Haunted = Old English

I believe Old English comes free with most Windows computers. If you don't have it, there are several similar fonts so you can mimic the look.

Week 9 - Embellishments

(For Stacy's 2Peas Organization Challenge)

I started color sorting when there was an article about Stacy Julians scrap room in Simple Scrapbooks magazine. They showed a pic of her brads in color-sorted buckets and I was sold. Then the The Organized and Inspired Scrapbooker book showed Beth Proudfoot's acrylic Container Store drawers that sorted everything by color. (I love her room - it's my dream room.) I would also love those drawers, but they don't fit my armoire, and I think some of my stash is too big for them anyway. So my variation is cheap and portable for crops - Hefty gallon zipper bags! We buy them in bulk at BJ's so I had plenty to work with, and the plastic zipper opens easily and provides support so they don't rip off the hook.

Here is a photo of my embellishment storage back when I still had the armoire in the dining room:


Color sorting has worked so well for me in the 3+ years I've been doing it, that I keep adding in more items over time. You name it - brads, buttons, frames, flowers, ribbon, chipboard - it's all in here. When I decided to add ribbon last winter, I moved from Plano/Creative Options bins to the bags. Items that are very tiny (brads and buttons) are in a snack size zipper bag inside the bigger bag. Most items are removed from packaging unless I think it could get damaged.

You can also see that items that are too large for the bags were hung behind on the hook. This was Doodlebug frills and rhinestones, and a (few) Thickers.

I've sorted some colors together because I only had 9 hooks on that door:
Pink (a very full bag!)
Red (use a lot of red, need to buy more)
Orange + Yellow (very little yellow)
Green + Aqua (mostly aqua)
Blue + Purple (little of either)
Multi - mostly multi-colored AC ribbon
Metallic (my old MM pewter stash)
Brown + Cream
Black + White + Clear (I keep white and clear together because I can recolor those items using paint, ink, etc)

The only items not in this system are:
raw chipboard (with my paints)
themes (holidays, school, birthday, baby - I mostly keep them separate for cards and gift albums)
specific line embellishments that haven't been opened yet. So I have a few BG, Crate and MM brad and button packs that I haven't used yet. I try to keep that to a small amount.

I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to hang the bags now that I don't have the doors. I think I'm going to buy some of those 3M sticky hooks and put them on the side of the armoire, nearest the table. That way I can move them if that doesn't work out. I just hope those hooks can hold the weight - some of those bags are heavy.

My Love Affair with the Label Maker: Organize Your Stuff Challenge - Week 9

July QuicKutz fonts

The new July release font matches are all commercial fonts this month:


Central Park = Hess Gothic Round
(this is really thin and probably won't cut well on a digital cutter)



Miss Muffet = Cinnamon Regular



Teriyaki = Hideaway PB

What to do with the remains?

So now I'm left with a shell of an armoire, and a 6 foot table for my craft space.



Two big issues to solve are:

1. Lighting. The basement overhead lights are abysmal and the desk lamp only works on the table - I know from past experience that the overhead basement lights are too inefficient to select items from in the armoire - that's why most of my stash ended up in the kitchen area of the basement, but it wasn't fun scrapping back there with the dead bugs, washing machine noise and the furnace (off-pic to the right). And it was impossible for me to sew standing up.

2. Safety. Without doors, DD can pretty much get into whatever she wants now, since she's smart enough to grab a chair and climb. I don't think she'll get into to my paper stash, but I need to find a safe, closable or even lockable place for the dangerous tools.

The other big problems to wrestle with are:

3. I need to condense ALL my stash into this area. The kitchen area, holding my overflow stash, needs to go back to being pantry space.



4. DD's craft area is going to be with mine, so we can work together and so I can keep an eye on her. So I need to keep enough room for 3 largish boxes of playdough, paints, etc.

RIP Scrapping Armoire

DH and I labored over the creation of a scrapping armoire over 3 years ago. It was a combination home office/scrap armoire, so that I could keep my stash with the computer and in a public area of our apartment, and then house. Due to both good and bad (good = birth of baby boy and the requisite baby gear taking over the house, bad = we needed more room in the dining room), I recently made the decision to divorce the office from the scrapping. The armoire would move downstairs into the retro 60s finished basement rec room to make a craft area for me and the little girl, and the computer would be left on a simple desk with some shelving and drawer storage.

So we moved the armoire downstairs over the weekend and disaster struck. The MDF around two of the hinges essentially disintegrated, so the left door couldn't be reattached. Without the left door, the heavy weight of right door made the whole unit off kilter.

So here is a photo homage to the old armoire in its hey day.
Here is how it looked in our apartment living room:


An early photo of my much smaller stash in 2006:


In use at this house's dining room:


And here it is now, it is denuded state:


Sniff. I miss my IKEA hanging storage already. Turns out it is perfectly stable with both doors removed. Without doors, its not much of an armoire, and I lose a good portion of usable storage space. The good news is that I get back half of the armoire that held the computer and financial files, and I have a huge table to work at now. I might actually be able to put all my stash in the same place. I'll have to think about how to wisely use this space, and share it with DD's craft supplies.