Do you love scrapbooking? Making jewelry? Knitting? Stenciling? Creating cool collages with textiles or paper?
No matter what type of crafting you’re into, there’s one thing that every crafter has in common:
Your workspace is full of all sorts of little things!
When the mood strikes to embark on a new crafting project, you want to get started right away. And if you’re not organized or don’t have the proper setup, you waste a ton of time looking for and gathering your supplies.
Whether your craft room is a spare bedroom, a garage, or a walk-in closet, here are nine craft room organization ideas to make your life easier.
1. Add Several Shelving Units
Bookcases, wall shelves, and cubby units are a must-have for holding crafting supplies. But when you use them in combination, you can create a one-of-a-kind organization display to keep all your tools and essentials.
Your craft room should be a space that inspires you. So get creative and mix and match different storage solutions, bookshelves, and cabinets to hold all your supplies.
If your craft room is super small, having tall shelving units can help you maximize space.
2. Invest in a Crafting Table
Buy or repurpose a desk or table so that you have a comfortable, designated space to work. You can save space in a small craft room by mounting a table that folds down from the wall. A kitchen island with storage cubbies or drawers is an ideal way to provide even more space for organization in an ample space.
If you do various crafts in a large space, you might even want to create two or three workstations. That way, you can designate zones for different types of projects.
3. Organize With Storage Baskets and Bins
Wicker or fabric baskets, and plastic storage bins are all great ways to hold miscellaneous crafting supplies. If you follow our first tip and invest in shelving and storage, you’ll be able to organize them beautifully!
Limited on space?
You can also mount storage bins directly onto the walls.
To do so, just mount bins on their side, so the bottom fixes to the wall and the open-top faces out. That way, you can use the bin as a makeshift shelf to arrange all sorts of small items, such as markers, paint tubes, or colored pencils.
4. Incorporate Drawers
Drawers are a great way to house small items (particularly round items) that are hard to stack on shelves. Be sure to have a few drawers in your craft room to hold rolls of decorative tape, organize rolls of ribbon, or display spools of thread.
Drawers are also great for holding messy or dangerous items, such as glue, carving tools, or jars of loose glitter. You know — things you may want to store safely out of reach from children and pets!
5. Use Magazine Holders for Paper
If you craft with paper, you probably have a lot of it. Magazine files are the perfect way to hold crafting paper, and they’re a super inexpensive storage solution that you can place on any shelf.
Stacking paper in horizontal piles often means having to rustle through the whole stack to find what you’re looking for. With your paper arranged by type or by color in an upright file, it will be much easier to find what you need.
6. Organize Supplies in Different Containers
You’ll be more inspired to work in your craft room if it’s organized neatly and efficiently. The best way to do so is to arrange like items in similar containers in the same area of the room.
Choose specific areas of your room to showcase different items. For example, display all your paints on shelves. Stash all your ribbons and threads in drawers. Stack all your fabrics in flat containers. Store all your loose papers in bins on wall shelves.
7. Hang a Pegboard
Mounting a pegboard to a wall is a great way to contain all sorts of small, miscellaneous items that you want to keep within easy reach.
You can easily hang items such as scissors, clean paintbrushes, and small tools from tacks on a pegboard. You can also use a pegboard to hang tape rolls, stencils, or little containers to hold pens and pencils.
Or fit pegboards with tiny shelves to store small items that you use daily — such as a tape measure or an Exacto knife.
Since you’re the creative type, you might even want to go one step further and paint or decorate your pegboard before you hang it on the wall.
8. Hold Miscellaneous Items in Mason Jars
Is your craft room cluttered with buttons, jewelry fasteners, scraps of fabric, or small pieces of ribbon?
Mason jars are an excellent way to store loose items that you want to keep out of the way but still within sight.
Mason jars come in all sorts of sizes, and the small ones are perfect for lining up on a slender shelf or stashing in a shallow drawer.
9. Organize by Color
If you’re going to spend the time organizing your craft room, you may as well make it look as good as it functions.
An easy way to do so is to arrange your supplies by color.
When lining up paint bottles on a shelf, arrange them from light to dark or dark to light. Do the same with craft papers in magazine files, markers or pencils stashed in cubbies, and tapes and ribbons stored in drawers.
This will make your room look more stylish and more appealing, and it will make it much easier to find the supplies you’re looking for when you need them.
Conclusion
There are tons of different ways to organize a craft room, but the key is to have multiple storage methods.
The more you can mix up shelves, cubbies, wall displays, drawers, and bins, the better. And never, ever think of organizing your craft room as a chore. Think of it as yet another project and another way to show off your creative skills!
Adam Marshall is a freelance writer who specializes in all things apartment organization, real estate, and college advice. He currently works with Traverse Commons to help them with their online marketing.