Organizing Art and Craft Supplies

If you love arts and crafts, you may have a single closet for your supplies, or an entire craft room. At some point, you could wind up having a difficult time keeping your supplies in order.

There are many solutions for organizing the large variety of craft supplies out there, whether you sew, paint, scrapbook, or knit. We’ve curated the most practical ideas we could find to give you some ways to get your supplies organized quickly.

Stickers and Paper

Scrapbookers know how tough it can be to keep craft paper, stationary paper, and stickers in order. A couple of simple filing boxes with file folders can make this much easier. Simply sort your papers or stickers into the file folders in the boxes, and retrieve what you need when you need it. These can go in the bottom of a closet, or on a closet shelf.

Storing Stamps

Once again, ordinary cardboard boxes come to the rescue. Rubber stamps, used in scrapbooking and other crafts, are generally short and fit well into small boxes. Depending on how many rubber stamps you have, one or several short boxes should be plenty to keep yours organized.

Ribbons

Fortunately, ribbons are easy to wrangle. Just get a standing paper towel holder or two and stack your ribbon spools along the pole. You don’t even have to remove them to unwind enough ribbon for your current project.

Brushes and Knitting needles

Make it easy to grab your paint brushes and knitting needles with ball mason jars or vases. Pick a jar tall enough to keep them in while still making them easy to take out. You can then keep them up in a closet, or at the back of a desk or crafting table. Brushes should be stored bristle-side up, and knitting needles should be stored pointy-side down. You don’t want to accidentally fall on a jar full of knitting needles, which is also why we recommend keeping them at the back of a desk, by the wall, or on a higher shelf.

Yarn and Fabrics

Need some place to stack yarn and fabrics where you can see them and easily get what you need? We recommend using a cubby shelf. This is like a bookcase, except that each shelf is divided into square sections. These work especially well for yarn wound up into a tube, rather than ball, shape, as you can stack them and easily see the color at the top of each bundle.

You can fold and stack your favorite fabrics by type in a cubby shelf as well. Alternately, for fabrics, consider getting a simple dresser. Fold your fabrics and put them in drawers according to type.

Thread and Paint

We found a tidy solution that works well for various types of paint as well as thread. It’s called “Rev-A-Shelf,” and it’s a drawer insert you could use in your desk, or you could get a night stand with multiple drawers to use it. It converts your drawer into a series of slanted shelves just large enough for spools of thread, paint tubes, and glue. This can prevent your items from getting mixed up in a drawer, and makes it easy to pick out what you need from the bunch.

Miscellaneous Items

Card catalogs may seem antiquated, but they’re a great place to store those small craft items that don’t seem to go anywhere else. Use the drawers for rolls of tape, beads, boxes of sewing needles, and more.

We hope these tips allow you to organize most of your craft supplies and make all your part projects less stressful and more fun.