Blogging Friends Blog Hop – Crafting Spaces

Welcome to this month’s “Blogging Friends Blog Hop!”

Who are the ‘Blogging Friends’? We are a group of Stampin’ Up! demonstrators located all across the U.S. and Canada who had never met before. Well, actually, we still haven’t met yet (in person). . . But, through our common bond of Stampin’ Up! and a shared love of papercrafting we have a fun blog hop to share with you. Please join us on the 1st of every month to see what wonderful things we have created!
Each month we’ll have a different theme; this month it’s Our Crafting Spaces!

This is very timely…. because it’s almost Spring… it should be right around the corner any moment now, right??  And what do you do in Spring?  SPRING CLEANING! But, I did say almost Spring… So, no spring cleaning has been going on in our house yet. That includes my stamping space. 🙂  It’s more of a stamping storage area right now, with a mostly-flat, less-cluttered-than-the-rest-of-the-room spot that I do my stamping on. So, I currently do the majority of the major crafting in the living room, or the dinette.. on the dining room table, or the floor, or the folding tables I set up for my classes… 🙂

Having said that, I thought I’d share some close-ups of those spaces, as well as a few pictures of my go-to storage spots for my supplies. I also had to throw in a few action shots of one of my furry friends that likes to ‘help’.

First, here’s that mostly flat spot I mentioned.. still a bit busy from the last card I made for a group challenge… you can see that card here–> Grateful Bunch Birthday Flowers. 

Yep. It’s that messy. But there really is some order to it.. I just have to figure out what that order is.  Ooooh! Bonus tip for those of you that use the nifty ink pad Color Caddy you see at the top there… I like to keep my ink pads in the same order all the time so I know where they are, and which ones I have to go hunt down. So, I took some markers and I numbered them, each color family in a different color. When I go to put them back, I just put them back in numerical order and don’t have to think about what goes where! It’s even a lot simpler than it sounds, really!

Ok….  up next…  Here are the tables I set up for my classes (this is the ‘after’ shot of the last class), and one of the tables usually sticks around longer than it should, where sporadic crafting gets done:

Here’s kitty trying to give her approval, I think:

She does that a lot. If there is crafting, she is right there:

Next we move to storage…  For my cardstock, the 8 1/2 x 11 anyway, I use a file cabinet with hanging folders. I love that idea because it’s closed to sunlight (which means no fading papers), and then I have a designated spot for everything!  I put a few colors in each folder – as long as they aren’t two shades of the same color. I then group the folders by color family. Scraps go in the folder, too. This has been a system I’ve used since the very beginning, and it works well for me.

For the stamps I use, I have a floor to ceiling bookcase that I stack all my stamps on.  I do happen to have many retired ones, so I have to keep them up on separate shelves to make sure I don’t use them for classes! The current ones are eye level and I use some of that space to store my clear blocks, too. Most of them are sitting on a table with stamps on them right now from this past weekend’s class. But this is where they go when they are not in use:

Well, that’s all for now.. at least what I’m willing to publish to the public. 🙂 Maybe after spring cleaning manages to roll around in my craft room, I’ll have even more to share.. but until then, please take a look at the rest of the fantastic posts from my fellow bloggers!

In case you’ve never ‘done’ a blog hop before, it’s really easy!
Right below this, you’ll see another image similar to the one at the top, and when you click on it, you’ll be taken directly to the next blog in the hop.  Keep clicking on that image at the bottom of each blog post, and you’ll hop through all of the participating blogs, back to where you started!  If you’d prefer to hop about at your leisure, you can click on the individual links for each blog. Happy Hopping!

Participating Blogging Friends, in order of appearance:

Crystal Komara
Anna Masciovecchio
Libby Fens
Anne Power
Mary Blocher
Danica Ferrante
Deborah Smart
Jessica Mink
Jodi Horsley
Leanne Johnson
Michelle Clark
Lorene Yoshimura-Tanigawa
Mary Ann Rossiter (StampinMak) – You are here!
Tammy Gill
Susan Timchack
Rick Adkins