Stuck in the Middle

I am stuck in the middle! I am stuck between Fun and Work. (isn’t everyone?) I am stuck between creativity and organization. Again. I am sure it won’t be the last time either!

Let me just start by saying that I *haven’t* studied all the cool scrapbooking studios, organization systems, methods of organized scrapbookers… all those things that might actually help me. I may end up doing so. Soon! But if you have A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G that’ll help me now, speak up! Please!

I wanted to play with my papers. All that color. All that potential. All that creativity waiting to happen. Then I recalled how frustrated I got trying to find the Right Piece of Paper for Becca’s dino thing. Since I wanted to make something small, I thought to myself, “Self, why don’t we just grab all the scraps together in one place, maybe sort them out as you’ve been planning to do. And oh, yeah, set aside all that solid colored card stock together for the Cardstock satchel if you run across some.”

Not being an official Scrapbooker, I don’t sort out my paper purchases when I come home. Scrapbooking stuff is jammed into a few tall and heavy stacks of containers, usually surrounded by … other stuff. It’s too much effort to sort them by categories when I get home. To keep them from getting wrinkled I eventually just tuck the purchases in the easiest-to-access plastic satchel.

I also tuck half-done, I’ll-get-back-to-it-later stuff into the easiest satchel. And those die-cuts I made at that store…

Therefore my papers are in a bunch of used-to-be-organized containers. One stack of paper sorted out into these categories, and I was finding stacks of scraps interleaved in the bottom layers of containers…

So I sorted. Scraps there, holiday themes, food, and coffee in those stacks, solid colored cardstock with the other… I am going to have trouble closing that cardstock satchel :(

But look what I found! Some pieces and parts of spring cards I started LAST JANUARY at Sam’s house! Just in time for this spring LOL!

 

But I’m still stuck in the middle between creativity and organization, and this is what it looks like.

I still need to find some slider-zip bags that will hold 12″ by (less than 12″) paper for the scraps to live in, sorted into categories that worked for me in a previous job:  Reds/burgundy, oranges, pinks and peaches, yellow/gold, green, (I might add a turquoise/teal/bluegreen here since I use so much,) blue, purple, red-violet/fucshia/not-really-pink, AND the key bags: Blacks/browns/neutrals, whites/off-whites/patterened, and multi. The multi is where you put things with three or more dominant colors; two if you really can’t decide. That’s where you look when you can’t find anything in the color bags :)

Soon, I will not only have this paper organized, but I will be setting up my ~studio~ into an actual studio with a papercrafting/mixed media art center! I might get a shallow drawer thing for the scrap system when I get my area set up.

And Sam’s gonna help with the studio :)

Gail