A Storage Idea

I have a tutorial here for you today.  Now I am not a tutorial person, so go easy on me!  I am also taking in the new Lessology challenge for this month which is envelopes.  I am sure you all have some of those kicking around so I hope to see you playing along with us this month, just remember that at least one thing has to be recycled/reused.

Our sponsor for this month is Gauche Alchemy and they are offering a $15 gift certificate to their store!!!

~~~~ And even more exciting!!!!! Gauche Alchemy has given LESSology followers an AWESOME coupon code to use during the month of August --

LESSology readers for 10% off, good from 8/6 thru 8/31.  (Good on everything but the ACME kit subscription.)

Code: lessology2012 ~~~~


I just went through a big purge/organization of my scraproom (one of my projects every summer).  Quite honestly I would love for my room to always be neat and tidy with things hidden away so it looked 'clean and crisp'.  However, I am a visual person, in order for me to use it, I have to see it or I forget I have it (I know there are others like me out there!).  One of the things I have had trouble with were my journal tags and such.  I used to have them in plastic bags by manufacturer.  But this was a problem because then when doing a page, I would have to search through them all to find things that would work.  Not only was this time consuming, it made a mess and more often than not, I just didn't bother using the tags.

Then the Lessology envelope challenge gave me the push I needed to organize them better.  I had a lot of 6
X 6 envelopes in my stash just taking up space.  I tend not to make cards that big.  So I decided to put them to better use.  I labelled my envelopes (using the Alphabet Soup stamp set by TAWS) according to the occasion (summer, fall, love, abc, everyday, christmas, halloween... etc).

Now here is a hint for you:  when stamping words with alphabet stamps and you have a word that uses a letter more than once but only one of the letters here is my trick:  stamp the word from the end to the beginning - that way you can take away the letters you don't need and add more that you do.  This also will make it so the word fits where you want it to.  For example: on my 'summer' envelope I stamped 'mer' at the edge, took away the 'er' and added 'su' in front of the 'm' and then stamped the remainder of the word.  Does that make sense?

I then sorted my journal cards and put them in the correct envelope.   The envelopes are of course put into the container in alphabetical order so they are easy to find.  Now when doing a page I will pull out the corresponding envelope and see what tags and such I can use.

Another hint:  Now because I do things for publication I need to know where my items are from.  Once they are out of the package, I may forget... so I stamped on the back of them some initials (ES = Elle's Studio; PLS = Pretty Little Studio;  CT = Chic Tags...).   No one will see this, so I wasn't worried about how perfectly I stamped.

Finally, I prefer to spend my money on craft supplies rather than on what to store them in so if I can find something inexpensive that works I am all for it.  In this case I had a plastic eclair package hanging around that I new would be useful one day.   Today was the day ;)  I am happy that it is white, so I left it... I like whiteness.  Of course though, it wouldn't be complete with a bit of scrappy decoration... so I adhered some Black V Striped Twill to fancy it up.  Easy Peesy!

Now there is room in the tub for more tags and such but not a lot.. so I either have to make sure I use them now or buy more eclairs so I have another tub, hehehe!