crafty space

So, here's some photos of my new crafty space. With baby #3 on the way, we reorganized some rooms upstairs. The baby will have Macy's current room and Macy will move into my old craft room.....which is currently a mess. Seriously. Stuff everywhere. A bunch of stuff we still need to go through and organize. And a bunch of stuff we're trying to sell at our garage sale, which is next weekend. Anyway, sometime in the next couple of months it will turn into a little girl's room, which will be fun! Matt moved his "office" out of our walk-in closet (which has never really been an actual closet) and his office-y stuff is now in our bedroom. And then I now have the walk-in closet for craft space....and it is also part home-office. Lots of transformations going on upstairs in the Beers' house! Projects like these are good for me. I like decluttering and moving stuff around and uncovering old stuff that I forgot about. We still have lots of work to do, but its coming along nicely!

As you walk in to the craft room, this is what you see. The room is about 6 feet wide and I think about 11 feet long. My craft island is no longer in the middle of a room (like it was in my old room), but now lives up against the window. I prefer to stand while scrapbooking, so this works well for me. I do have a stool to sit on when I get tired of standing, but mostly I stand. I do get a little tired of standing for so long now that the baby bump is sticking out there.....

Most of my stamps live on that brown bookshelf in the back right corner. Foam stamps and acrylic stamps hang on the side of the bookshelf. Then, the old divided wine box next to the bookshelf is something Matt put together for me that houses all my loose wooden stamps and some other random things. Ink pads and markers all live in the ink pad holder on the right wall. And ribbons are next to that. Albums, photo boxes, and memory boxes are all in the low bookshelves on both sides of the room. Memory boxes (for lack of a better name) is what I call the boxes where I store all the stuff that doesn't really fit in a scrapbook. Or, stuff that I will go through later to scrapbook. For example, Jack brings home school papers from school every Tues/Thurs, so I go through his bag and decide what to keep or recycle. If I'm keeping it, it goes in his memory box (each child has his/her own box and Matt and I share one) and I decide later what to scrapbook or where to keep his important papers and craft projects that I want to keep. I'll keep a few birthday cards for each birthday and those go in there too. Other random things in there are birth announcements, hospital bracelets, etc. Lately, I've discovered that what works best for me is to actually put as much of this stuff as possible right in with thier regular scrapbooks, that way everything is in one place. So, after Jack's first semester of preschool, I decided to keep only a small selection of papers that he brought home. I just stuck them all in one page protector, labeled the year, and in the scrapbook it goes! Easy enough. Ok, enough about that....back to the crafty space....

The next photo is what it looks like standing at the craft island and looking the other way. I have a bunch of 12 x 12 acrylic frames hanging around the room where I hang most recently completed layouts. I like looking at my stuff before putting them in page protectors and away in an album. Way in the back corner is where the home-office part of the room is....not much going on back there! That tall filing cabinet is something Matt had in his room when he was a kid and he spray painted it random colors.