Saturday, July 19, 2008

MY STAMP ROOM

It's been a while since I've posted. Sorry about that, things have been crazy here. We had company, my son broke his leg and had to have surgery, my father had to have surgery the next week and now I'm job hunting. It makes me tired thinking about it all now. I haven't been too creative, but I have been organizing my stamp room, so I thought I'd share that with you. It's a form of creativity-right? So here it is. Enjoy!


My stamp room is half of my spare bedroom. I share the space with my husband and sons. My husband LOVES Mustangs and that's why we have two (1965 & 2005) but that's not enough for him. He collects mini Mustangs. You know, like Matchbox. So, those are what you'll see on the walls and all over. My youngest son collects bugs and you may see a few of those. This is the back wall that I would consider the start of my stamping space. I have two EK Success paper racks for all of my 81/2"x11" papers. I got them when my favorite stamp store went out of business. Next to them are my drawers of little things. I also have two custom made oak stamp holders and I will show you them closer below. On top of my Oak cabinet is two smaller stamp drawers that I've had since I got into stamping. My organizer is on top of those with notebooks of ideas and projects from classes I've attended.

This is my stack of drawers that hold all of the smaller things like glitter, embossing powders and brads. I also store my tags, fibers and paints here. The one to the left goes all the way to the ceiling. but I'm about to change that. I'll post when I change it.


This is one of my cabinets. It holds most of my unmounted stamps. I have my Carl cutter and Cuttlebug on the top surface.

This is the inside of one side of the Oak Cabinet. A man in Daytona made these for me and I adore them. It holds clear picture frames that I fill with my stamps by category. The drawers slide out to go wherever I need them. Most of my stamps are unmounted, but I have certain collections that are still mounted. The door has little shelves on them to hold my background stamps. I'm looking to change that too so I'll post when I get that done.



These are the drawers that hold my unmounted stamps. I have them in categories that work for me. They are all on EZ mount foam and stored on the lightweight binder sheets from Sunday International. It;s the best system out there. The top drawer on the left holds mounts and the two top drawers on the right hold clear sets. There are notebooks along the side of the drawers that contain stamped images of each stamp by category and sheet. As you can see everything in my stamp room is labeled. I bought a label maker years ago and can't live without it.



This is the inside of my drawer that contains my images from Posh Impressions. This set came on EZ mount and was pre-labeled. I only have a few like that, but they sure are easy to pick out.



This is a drawer with my Hero Arts images. I fanned them out a bit so you can see I have 8 sheets of images in each drawer. I do still have a few drawers that aren't UM stamps and they hold my glitter glues and re-inkers.

This is my stamping desk. It's a computer hutch. It is set into half of a closet. It fit perfectly. There are shelves my husband built to the right of the desk and wire closet shelves to the left. It looks really messy in the picture, but it isn't. I have a cork board on the back of the desk. There is a slide out computer keyboard drawer that holds many things. It has my Score-It, cutting mats and tidy tray. It's really handy to reach down.

This is the shelves to the right. The top one holds a stamp pad rack from the same store that I got my paper racks at. It holds my most used ink pads. there are some of those Mustangs I mentioned earlier. They are ALL over! LOL!
This is the top of my hutch. It contains two handmade ink pad holders. They are made out of foam core & hot glue. My husband & I made them. Pretty cool huh? I found wonderful directions for how to make these on a blog. I also made a little version out of black foam core and it holds most of my markers.


This is the wire shelves to the left of my stamp table. It holds things that I want to be able to reach over to grab when I'm working on a project. It has papers, stamp cleaning pads, markers and adhesives to name a few things. It connects over to the other half of the closet that I don't use for stamping.

My stamp room isn't as polished as many I've seen, but it is very functional. Everything has a place and I can easily find anything I need. Let me know if you have any questions. Maybe someone could leave me a comment? Let me know how I'm doing. I hope to update things more often once I get back on track. Let me know if you want to see anything done with my blog.
JIL


4 comments:

Char said...

OHMAGOSH, you're the Queen of Organization! I saw your previous stamp room...and I just can't believe you managed to fit so much stuff into such a small area!!! All I want to know is, when you are going to organize MY stamp room???*LOL*

Carolyn said...

Oh my gosh, Jil. Can you come and get me organized. Your craft area is a stamper's dream. I buy and store and before long, I can't find anything. I've reorganized so many times but have not found the perfect solution.

The one thing we do have in common is the way we store our UM stamps. I have a lot of stamps on wood and I store them in cases by theme and they stack on edge on shelves in my craft closet. They are out of the way but yet handy when I want to select images. I think I am the only one that stores ink pads in tool cases. Several years ago I bought two cases at Home Depot that had movable slots that fit ink pads perfectly. I have these cases along side of my desk and can easily grab them when needed. The pads I don't use as often are in another case altogether.

Embellishments and trinkets are the items I can never find. Tim Holtz once said, "just dump them all in a big drawer and go through them when you need something."

Not a good idea for me.

Thanks for sharing and yes Char could use your help just to get her supplies out where she can use them.

Carolyn said...

Jil, please add another post. Each time I look at your perfectly organized craft area, I think to myself that I should stop and at least work on one of my stacks.

If you would post one of your beautiful cards, I could drool and not think about my mess.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Carolyn S

Stacey Greenawalt said...

Great job on the inkpad holders! Glad they were so easy to make!