Tip for Tuesday

In case I didn't mention, I am a librarian by profession, which makes how my craft stuff is organized or should I say not organized so sad. After recently buying the same cuttlebug die twice, I just knew that I needed to take some time and organize. So for the next couple of weeks, I will be describing how I am organizing or I should say cataloging my craft supplies utilizing basic library principles.

The first is my stamps! I have tons of stamps and I somehow end up with duplicates! I must really like these stamps that I rebuy even though I end up using the same stamps over and over again. I really had to think about how I could catalog my stamps and at the same time know what I have so that I can use those stamps that have never seen ink. The first idea was to use a binder. I just happened to find my Stamp-a-log. I had bought this little baby thinking I would get organized over 6 years ago!

The binder is about 9 inches tall by 7 inches wide. It comes with different tabs and different lined pages with art/stamp/scrapbooking categories. I'm going to focus on the master stamp list. Here I wrote the name of my stamp set, along with the category of the stamp and where it is located.

My CTMH stamps are by color group.

To the left, you see a number, that refers to the page number in the binder where a picture of the images in that stamp set are located.

This is a GREAT idea in using up old or outdated catalogs for demos or consultants. I cut the picture of my stamp set out and paste it on this page. CTMH images are at 50% so they fit perfectly. If you don't want to cut up your cattys or you want to make the images a different size just use your home copier or photocopy the stamps themselves. Sure beats stamping each stamp individually!

I find that it takes me forever to get started crafting because I have to look through all my stamps and then put them all back, just to decide which stamps to use, or when looking for the right sentiment. This way, I just look through my binder and decide what I want to use and go right to it, so fast and so easy!

Of course it's always time consuming to organize. That's time away from crafting! But in the end it will not only save you time but money too!

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