Bead storage and organization
By A Jones For Organizing In Craft supplies organizing, General organizingDo you need help with organizing your craft supplies? Are your sewing materials or embroidery supplies or hobby tools all jumbled together in bins or bags? Do you wish that everything was easy to find, and easy to access, in an organized manner? Do you end up buying more items because you can’t find the ones you already own? Do you wish that your hobby work area made you smile every time you saw it?
No matter what kind of hobby or craft project you do, I can come up with a vision of a new organizing system that is
- customized for your needs
- easy to use, and
- easy to maintain
Contact me to see if I can help you with your craft supplies!
My client does exquisite, complicated embroideries that involve dozens of colors of floss and lots of impossibly tiny glass beads. I organized her embroidery floss , too, but here I’ll show you the system I came up with for organizing her beads. It’s hard to see in this picture, but the mermaid has tiny glass beads woven into her hair and clothes. It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?
I don’t know if I could ever do this kind of painstaking, meticulous work. My talents run more toward organizing all those tiny beads. I came up with a list of requirements for an organizing system that would work for her, and that would be easy to maintain:
- the beads should not get accidentally mixed together, so they need to be in separate boxes, with the numbers easy to read
- the bead storage boxes should be shallow enough to dip an embroidery needle into, to harvest a bead
- the bead storage boxes should be secure enough not to spill (very important)
- the bead storage boxes should be easy enough to open so that opening them doesn’t make the beads explode and spill all over the place (don’t ask me how I know that)
The beads come in little boxes, but it’s too hard to see the numbers in different places on the packages. Also, laying them flat to see the numbers would take up too much space, since there were about 70 different colors to manage.
I found some bead storage boxes at Michael’s, that worked great. The carrying case comes with lots of little boxes for beads, and I found some small Avery Labels that fit perfectly on those boxes.
These little boxes were shallow, making it easy to reach in with a needle and harvest one bead at a time.
It’s very important, by the way, when doing jobs like labeling bead boxes, that you not have dyslexia. Bead color number 03087 can so easily become 03078. It looked the same, for a second there, didn’t it? Yeah.
After I labeled all the boxes, I filled up one shallow drawer with all of her beads, in numerical order, with some empty labeled boxes for future expansion. I didn’t pack them in as tightly as I could have, because I wanted her to be able to easily reach in and pick a box out. So they are stored loosely in there, with dividers between the rows so that they don’t get mixed up and out of order.
The plastic strips that I used to divide the bead boxes are these Custom Drawer Organizer Strips. You can cut them to fit by scoring them with a utility knife, and then bending them over a table or counter until they snap at the scored line and break apart.
This was such a fun project for me to work on! Now my client can see all of her bead colors easily, and find the right one quickly, and spend her valuable time enjoying her hobby instead of struggling with her supplies.
Do you have any craft supplies that I can help you organize? See my Contact page!
