Craft Paint Storage

I have a lot of craft paint, and puffy paint, and now even inks. All those little bottles are hard to keep track of and it seems like they are everywhere in the craft room. To help corral everything into one place I bought these revolving storage bins from Harbor Freight Tools ($19.99).

Image from Harbor Freight Tools

The two bottom trays each have three dividers, so I can sort my paints out into primary and secondary colors. The top two bins have six dividers each, perfect for puffy paints, inks, and sprays (I have fewer of them and they are in smaller bottles). I can’t wait to get all my paints and inks put away!
Before you rush out to get yours, remember that it comes unassembled. It took me over an hour to put it together and I am pretty experienced assembling stuff. Every divider (there are 18) has 4 bolts, 4 washers, and 4 nuts that have to be put together. Getting all the dividers in was a little tricky, that’s a lot of parts that have to match up!
I also need to do some more tidying in the basement to make room for two giant wooden desks that my Mother rescued for us (they were going to haul them to the dump, who does that?) What are you plans for the weekend?
Have a super crafty weekend!

Organized: Ribbon Storage

I have noticed in the background of a few blogs recently an wonderful way to store ribbon that I have never seen before.   All you need is a swing arm skirt hanger.Swing those arms open and take the skirt clips off (I bet we can find something else to do with them) and slide your ribbon on. My husband just informed me that his Mother used to do this.  Um yeah, thanks for telling me, I could have been storing my ribbon this way for years!!!  His response was, “I’ve never seen you really work with ribbon.”  My reply was, “I have at least one of every craft supply known to man, you should have known I had ribbon.”  So if you have already heard this tip, sorry :)  Seriously, organized ribbon makes me happy.  Now I’m wondering if there is anything else I could store on another one of these!

Reminiscing and Eraser Stamps

Once upon a time I used to draw a tarot card every day and journal about it. The card was always a good prompt, even if I only wrote to say that the card had nothing to do with what was going on with me that day (which wasn’t normally the case). It started because I wanted to learn how to read tarot cards, I did the lessons on learningtarot.com to learn the basics and started drawing a card a day and journaling to help me learn what all the cards meant. I enjoyed it so much that I made a special box to store my cards, reference book, journal, and pens (yes, pens, I like to color code my entries). I also decoupaged my favorite card onto my journal cover and got an awesome handmade orange tarot card bag from a swap on Craftster. And then we started our family, I still managed to draw a few cards here and there, but I completely fell out of the habit when we moved back to Nebraska (last entry 3 1/2 years ago). Here in our new house I see my special box every day and I always think ~ I should get that out and start drawing a card a day again and then I get busy and forget. Well yesterday I finally got that box out and dusted it off. Whew, that was a long story. Here is the box and all the stuff from inside, including the new stamps and calendar I made to encourage myself to get back in the habit. I think it is really interesting to see the patterns that the cards make on such a graphic level. I also really love having everything lined up like this, I think I might be some sort of organizational nerd. I finished the box with a thick coat of super shiny sealer which makes it really hard to take a good photo of it.Here, at an angle, you can see it better. I used a plastic bag and black and blue spray paint to make the background and I printed out all the images on cardstock and decoupaged them on. The cardstock really gives a 3-D look that I love! I carved an eraser stamp for each suite (wands, swords, pentacles, and cups) and a sun for the major arcana cards (and cupcakes too). I’ll stamp the appropriate symbol on my calendar and write the card name in the proper color below it and I’ll have a nice orderly record! I also journal about the drawn card in the proper color, just thinking about it makes me happy :)

If you’re wondering, my card for the day (Tuesday, I draw at the end of the day) was The Hermit.