Catherine Ensley's Words World and Wings: One Scrapbooker's ...

I've written before about my scrapbooking room. Since the last time, two years ago, the room's changed quite a bit.

I'm almost hesitant to show it off. If you Google terms such as "Where Bloggers Create," you will find craft rooms of women who are featured in Somerset's Artful Blogging magazine.

Those rooms are incredible. They are in themselves things of beauty. Pictures of rooms you would Pin. My room's not a thing of beauty, but of organized functionality where I create things of beauty and worth to me. Our family's photo album scrapbooks.

It was early in 2004 that I took up scrapbooking, at which time I took a five-year hiatus from my writing. Since then, I've created 30+ scrapbooks, and yet I still haven't put a dent in photo journaling my family history. During those years, besides our nuclear family's history, I made a scrapbook for my father's 80th birthday, a memorial for my mother's funeral, and two retirement scrapbooks for friends with whom I worked.

I love scrapbooking so much that I could've devoted all of my free time to it forever, but I also love writing, and I eventually (mostly) set it aside and took up writing again in my spare time. Now that I've retired from the full time paying job, there's much more time for unpaid joys.

The first picture, above, is of the west wall. Unlike the pictures you would see in Artful Blogging, I'm not interested in having artful containers for my embellishments. Instead, I adore functionality AND keeping things in drawers, so they stay clean and free of dust.

This second picture is of a set of three shelves along the North wall. Each shelf is 10 feet long and, as you can see, stuffed with stuff. Below the shelves is a long desktop, not shown in this picture, but in the one below.

The Northeast corner of the room is devoted to paints, stamping ink, glitter and embossing materials, plus all manners of distressing and collage tools. Yes! Paste; UTEE; sponges, paint brushes and so on.

You see a lot of crates. Each one contains patterned paper in different themes such as: High Summer; Indian Summer; Autumn (October 1 through Thanksgiving); Halloween; Christmas; Winter; Farm; Travel; New Year; Fourth of July; Courtship, Weddings and Anniversaries; and Heritage.

It's very possible to stack all of those crates on top of each other, but I refrain from stacking them more than two or three deep, so that when I want something, I don't need to move a dozen crates to get to it, but only one or two.

This picture is of my primary work area, East wall, although I am currently working on my laptop at the table on the West wall, first picture in the post. This is the same picture as before, but with a better view of how I handle storage. Under each of my countertops--I have a 4-foot table on the West wall, a 12-foot built in desk with countertop on the North wall, and a 8-foot table (to the left) on the East wall--beneath each of these are rolling drawers. Ugly, but functional. The drawers in this picture are overflowing with embellishments, grouped by color. These drawers hold some of my rubber stamps. The crates to the left of them contain some of the patterned papers in different themes. More rubber stamps and also card making supplies and frames. These are my 12x12 colored paper drawers, which contain Bazzill and Colormate papers (solid colored cardstock), as well as patterned papers in each color that are not theme-specific.

The paint chips denoting the colors are from Sherwin and Williams, my favorite paint store.

They help me zero in on what color, exactly, I am looking at, in many cases, as I sort the papers by color.
When the intensity of each color is so dulled as to become neutral, I use another tool, a color swatch indicator used by quilters.

The final picture shows my ribbons, again sorted by color. I used to keep them out in the open, on dowels for easy unrolling, but I decided keeping them clean was far more important to me than having them look pretty.

That's a tour of my scrapbooking room, where I keep promising myself that I'll start spending more time. Hey! I'm it right now. Guess I may as well start scrapbooking last January's trip to Disneyland with our son and his family.

Such a joy. Such a labor of love.

Do you have a crafting room or area where you can create to your heart's content?

Source: http://wordsworldandwings.blogspot.com/2013/05/one-scrapbookers-paradise.html

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