It became obvious fairly early on that I was going to need a method for storing and organizing my card stock. Having it piled up on my kitchen table wasn’t working too well! I’ve seen pictures of people’s craft rooms with wall mounted racks with a slot for each colour but I don’t have a dedicated craft room. Yet! And I’m not sure how such a system works for scraps. I want to have the scraps in the same place as the uncut card stock so that I don’t have to remember to first check the special scraps place.  I took a trip to Staples and found two plastic crates which hold letter sized hanging folders, which of course Staples also sells. The crates have lids and they stack which is handy for when going to a carding weekend (as I’m doing this weekend). I’ve found that by moving some of the folders from one crate to the other it leaves sufficient room for my color caddy. It’s a very secure way of transporting it.

I decided to organize my card stock by family: regals, subtles, brights, neutrals and two in colors. Being a mathematician (or that’s what I’m blaming for it) they are ordered alphabetically within each family. I realise that might be overkill for most people! Here’s one of my two crates; I have one blue and one see through. This way, I know without thinking which crate has what I need. This is my subtles, regals and 2014-2016 in colours crate.  I cut a scrap into 2 inches by 7/8″ for the tab label on each colour (I haven’t finished that yet as you can see). I might actually write the names of the colours on the labels one of these days, but I quite like how it looks with just the colour. Maybe I’ll write the colour name on the folder itself. Within each folder I have the uncut cardstock at the back with scraps at the front so it’s extremely simple to see if I have a scrap that will work for whatever I’m planning. I recently bought a carl paper trimmer which will cut multiple sheets at a time (and saves the blade on my stampin’ trimmer) so I’ve also got a stash in each folder of half sheets of each cardstock for my usual sized cards.

I’m really happy with my storage solution. It’s easy to move out of the way if we want to use the kitchen table, it gives me back quite a bit of real estate on the table itself, it’s easier to find the colour that I’m looking for than searching through piles and it also gives me a quick view into which colours are running a bit low.