Happy Monday everyone! I hope your weekend was great! Ours was spent mostly indoors as we got a ton of rain!
Last month, I was helping my kids do yet another craft project at home and my daughter was searching for googly eyes that I knew had been thrown in a bag and stuffed in a drawer….somewhere. As she was searching through all the drawers in our playroom she was pulling out other craft and art supplies as she went and she kept saying, “Mommy, can we do an art project with these? Oh, and how about one with these? Mommy, what can we make with these?” It was like she had never seen all these other craft supplies that we’d always had, but that were never visible to her. The wheels in my head started spinning and I vowed to get our craft supplies organized in a way that they would be visible to her at all times and easily accessible.
Of course I started out my search on Pinterest and got some great ideas, especially this one.
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I loved how everything was visible with the clear jars and readily accessible. So with this as my inspiration, I got to work. I didn’t have an old bookshelf that I could use, so I searched for something online. My two year old is still in the “I want to draw with marker on EVERYTHING” phase, so I also wanted something that I could close if needed, like some sort of cabinet. After a ton of searching, I found the perfect solution. For the craft supplies, I purchased this South Shore Morgan Storage Cabinet.
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We’ve got some other shelving in our playroom made by South Shore and it’s been great so far. I consider it a Pottery Barn Kids knockoff. Very similar styles at about a third of the price.
I also, needed somewhere to store all of their colored paper, foam sheets and the millions of coloring books, sticker books and activity books that we’ve collected over the years. So I purchased the South Shore Stor It Storage Drawer to go underneath the cabinet.
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I needed a way to organize the papers and books in the drawer, so I also bought these hanging file frames and these colored hanging file folders.
Now that I had somewhere to put all of the craft supplies, I needed a way to organize them inside the cabinet. Following in the footsteps on my original inspiration, I bought the same tall jars and short jars from Oriental Trading. I really, really love these jars. Not only do they easily display their contents, but they are made of a soft plastic so they don’t break or crack when dropped (which believe me, when you have little hands that constantly drop things, this is very important). I also hit up our local Dollar Tree for some miscellaneous baskets for paints and glue.
Once everything came in, I got to work assembling it all (with the help of my husband, of course). My kids helped me put all of the supplies into the jars and we sorted out the supplies that would go into the baskets. In the tall jars we put pipe cleaners, foam stickers, paint brushes. craft sticks, cotton balls, tissue squares, glitter glue, ribbon, and markers. In the short jars we put rocks, string, beads, googly eyes, sequins, pom poms, buttons, and craft flowers. In the baskets we put all of our colored glue in one, paints in another, stamps in another, and one with hole punches, staplers, etc. I also have this great scissor rack that a friend gave to us. In the drawer we sorted the colored paper and foam sheets by color and put them in individual files on one side of the drawer. On the other we sorted all of the books by categories (coloring, sticker, activity, etc.) and put them in file folders as well.
Once we were done, we stood back and admired our work. We went from this:
Supplies stuffed in bags in drawers.
Nothing visible or easy to access.
Whatever couldn’t fit in the drawers thrown on top of the toy shelves.
To this:
Everything visible.
Paper and books easy to find.
Completely accessible.
Totally functional.
And can be closed when needed.
We are all really loving our new craft supplies organization and my kids have done several projects since with supplies that they previously didn’t even realize we had. Mission accomplished!