Friday, November 23, 2007

Organizing Your Scrapbook Space to Help Your at Home Scrapbooking Business

There are an endless number of tools and supplies that help us turn plain pages into works of art for our customers. But organizing and storing all those wonderful embellishments we use to create with can be challenging. Spending time digging through drawers and boxes looking for supplies is frustrating and time consuming and time is money. There are simple and inexpensive ways to help you spend less time searching for your supplies and more time exactly creating.

Sorting supplies by categories or themes is very useful and you can tell at a glance what you have in stock. Some useful categories are Winter, Christmas, Easter, Valentines, Baby girl, Baby boy, etc. Create interesting labels using 2"x 4" address labels and your computer. You can have fun with this too by adding small graphics and matching the font to your business cards.

Be sure to save all those scrap pieces of paper into themes also. A great item for this are those accordion style keepers available at most office supply stores and 12"x 12" Paper Envelopes by Cropper Hopper. By saving all those scraps of paper you can use them to make die cuts and punches to match those wonderful pages you are creating.

What to do with all those fibers and ribbons ? Place fibers in small plastic bags and store them in your theme containers. Smaller plastic containers work great to store fibers by colors. You can also use recycled clear jars, cleaned and labels removed, and sort by color. Add your creative labels to these also. Photo boxes are a great size for holding spools of ribbon and these come in clear. Another great solution is to hang a small pretty curtain rod on your wall and thread those ribbon spools on the curtain rod.

Paper is one of the most important staples and storage is also a major problem for most at home scrapbooking businesses. Paper comes in hundreds of different colors, patterns, textures and weights. It needs to be kept dry and clean, be photo safe and stored in plain sight. Paper can be stored in a wide variety of ways but horizontal is the best. There are lots of wonderful products out there, from wire storage racks to clear stacking plastic trays and are a very good investments.

Colleen Shiach had been scrapbooking on and off for 10 years when she decided to start her own company in 2004. Colleen now owns and operates Colleen's Memory Albums, a scrapbook for hire service that carries pre made scrapbook pages and albums, scrapbook supplies, tear bears and handmade embellishments. Check out her website at

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