where'd thursday go? oops!

i missed things i love thursday this week, obviously!

thursday evening was busy putting together something that i REALLY love though - a shelf!

my area of the house is set up in such a way that i have my bedroom, my studio, a little hallway to a door outside and a door into the house, and then i have a little room that connects to our crawl space. it's pretty full of stuff, it has an upright freezer, two filing cabinets, a dresser full of patterns, and two of those rolling bin things full of sewing supplies. the room itself has a very low ceiling, and we have storage on top of it as well (full of my little brother's crap, mostly). it has to stay fairly clear, because you need to go through it to the crawlspace, but a few weeks ago i got the idea that i could put up a shelf and clothes rack above the rollybins and the shorter filing cabinet. i kinda obsessed about it for a while, but i was scared to go buy the supplies myself and i bought the wrong thing!

so on thursday i finally convinced my dad to go to home depot (by threatening to do it myself - he was worried about me buying the wrong stuff too!!), so we went and got the supplies, and came home and put the shelf up. omg, i LOVE it! i made certain that the shelf was low enough from the ceiling that i could stack several containers on it, and now i can keep all of my organized supplies in there!

as much as my studio is an absolute disaster, some parts of it are extremely organized. that's my big cleaning avoidance technique. i should be cleaning, but instead i decide to sort the giant grocery bag full of zippers by colour and size, or organize all my stamps, etc.

i actually took pictures of the stamp organizing a few months ago, intending to post them here, and never got around to it. i have A LOT of stamps, it's quite ridiculous.

here's what i started with -

pile #1, from my bathroom


the overflowing rubber stamp bin


the overflowing clear stamp bin


and pile #2, also from the bathroom (that's my little stamp cleaning station, with the vintage holder, toothbrushes, ink removers, etc)


i didn't even take pictures of the overflowing ink bins!

it was impossible to find anything, and i kept making projects and then later remembering a different stamp that would have worked better. blegh!

so i organized.

the new clear stamps containers (blocks and alphabets on top, most everything else in the lower)


the new rubber stamps containers (foam stamps at the very top, alphabets and unmounted in the middle, and mounted stamps in the bigger one on the bottom)


and the inks (stazOn on the left, pigments and embossing powder on the right, and waterbased inks, alcohol inks and various other things like flocking on the bottom)

since then my dad bought me a whole basket of embossing powder at a silent auction, so i have another container just of them.

so now all my stamping stuff is nicely organized! except that until thursday, these bins were all over the studio, getting in my way all the time.

hence why i love my shelf! i can put all my papercrafting bins in there, as well as my jewelery bins (that rarely get used) and some of my less-used sewing supplies. and when i need them, i can just pull them out! the rod underneath is used for all of the sewing patterns that i've traced onto cloth or old sheets over the years, they hang on pant hangers, and clothes that i've made over the years that i can't bear to give up.

oh, so nice.

of course, looking at my studio, you'd never know that i just took all those bins out.... i have a lot more cleaning to do!