Category: Arts and Craft Supplies Organization

We’re still unpacking and organizing in the new house, most especially in our homeschooling and craft room. Here’s a simple organization project to organize ribbon remnants inspired by this picture from Country Living Magazine.

We wrapped remnants of ribbon on vintage wooden spools that we spotted at a local craft resale shop for twelve cents a piece:

To keep the ribbon from unwinding, we temporarily taped it while securing the spools with elastic:

We fed the elastic through the center of the spool then pulled tight, making a circle of elastic around the spool, knotting both ends together. We then stuffed the knot into the center of the spool, hiding it:

Then we placed the ribbon spools on a wooden spool rack:

Now our ribbons are accessible (instead of tangled in a box!) and easy on the eyes.

This is a post that I have been meaning to write since February, the last time we went to IKEA. I kid you not. This post is eight months late! (I am so behind with, oh, everything.)

Here’s an easy way to make a transportable art caddy. Gather empty and clean tin cans and/or jam jars and place them in a handled wooden cutlery tray.

This particular wooden silverware tray came from IKEA, cost less less than $7, and holds six cans.

In our art caddy we have a spot for markers, colored pencils, writing pencils, erasers, scissors, glitter glue pens and popsicle sticks.

Instead of adhering the cans to the tray, we left them free floating so we can remove individual cans from the caddy to bring just one artistic medium to the table.

I have plans to paint the caddy blue… but considering that I’ve been meaning to paint it since February, it may be a long time coming.

Another post in our Arts and Crafts Organization project. To read all of the posts in this series, please click here.

I had a sneaking suspicion that we had a tremendous quantity of felt in the house.

We buy it secondhand (usually in unused condition complete with their original price stickers) from our local craft resale shop for $2/lb. Whenever we spy a great color, we snatch it up. It costs us pennies. Literally.

We’ve been storing these overflowing bags of felt in inconvenient places, such as down in the kitchen (why o why?!) and tucked away in a corner of my daughter’s bedroom.

I didn’t realize quite how much we actually had though until we gathered it up to one place, sorted it by color, and stored it away in this giant plastic storage bin.

Above, felt sheets on the left and scraps on the right.

Yes, we have a lot of felt. A tremendous amount.

Nevertheless, we’ve found we need a few more shades of orange (for sewing carrots!) and light green (to sew more mixed salad greens!). We better keep a lookout for those shades at the craft store.

Because heaven forbid we don’t have the exact right shade of felt and have to drive into town. (Ah, life with a three year old. Everything becomes terribly dramatic.)

Meanwhile, time to get crafting!

We’ve finally been making headway on our arts and craft supplies organization project.

This week we focused on decluttering and reorganizing these plastic drawers. To refresh your memory, here is what the drawers looked like before:

They were (inadvertently) fully accessible to our daughter (who discovered that she could reach the drawers by standing on a chair), yet full of all sorts of messy supplies that we didn’t particularly want her to use entirely by herself like finger-paints and mama’s hot glue gun:

Luckily she always asked before she delved in those drawers, so I don’t have any horror stories to share. Nevertheless I knew the day would come when she explored them entirely on her own, so we had to move the supplies around to get them out of her reach.

We essentially emptied these drawers, placing those supplies elsewhere (more on that soon!), and filled the drawers up with more age-appropriate supplies.

We also moved the drawers to a more easily accessible location so she can help herself to…


stickers,

activity books,

pads and pens (pencils are always accessible, placed out on the table),

crayons,

and miscellaneous supplies.

We’re very pleased with the results. We have one more drawer to fill and I have yet to tackle the clutter on top of the shelves, but it’s better and supplies that had been forgotten are being used. Success!