In a jewellery making space, sometimes you find yourself wanting to do a little more than tidying up. Instead of a full remodel of the work space another approach will be to look at things with a different perspective.
To follow are 3 tips for organizing your jewellery making supplies.
1. Determine How You Design to Help Guide Your Framework
Everyone organizes their jewellery making supplies in different ways. Every once in awhile, it’s good to step back and assess if your system is still working for you or if it’s time to evolve.
Sort your jewellery making supplies by colour. Originally, all beads of one colour family went into one box. As your collection grows, you need to rethink this method. Stick with sorting by colour but remove smaller beads from the mix. You can then do another sorting and move all seed beads to jars and tubes so they can be seen more easily and free up space in the boxes for other types of beads.
2. Label, Label, Label Jewellery Making Supplies
Putting beading and jewellery making supplies out where you can see them can help save time. This step can also help you not to buy the same things over and over again just because you can’t see them. But, not everything looks pretty on display nor does everyone have room to put everything out in the open. So, how to organize in a way that makes it easy to find your materials, keep things tidy, and make it easy to clean up when you’re done? Enter labels!
As time consuming as it might seem to label your containers, it’s worth the effort! And if this is a new step for you, start by labeling your containers to identify what’s inside — for example, “red beads,” “sterling silver findings,” “sterling silver metal sheet” etc. If needed, use plastic bags to house a finer level of sorting – “ear wires,” “clasps,” and “jumprings.” As you progress, label the tubes you place your seed beads into.
Label your gemstone strands so you don’t forget what was written on the receipt you filed with your taxes 3 years ago and label your tool bins which are sorted by soldering, bench tools, hand tools, etc.
Add labels to your decorative storage bins. These bins in particular have coordinating label frames you can easily change as the contents change.
These frames slip over the edge of a box and are chalkboard in nature so can easily be written on then updated.
3. Place Your Tools in Easy Reach
Regardless of your type of craft, you likely need tools. If you’re like many of us, one tool of the same kind is never enough. How to keep those tools at the ready means different things to each of us.
Consider suspending a rod between two brackets then hang up your pliers and cutters. In the picture below, you can get towel racks then fit it on the wall. The benefit with either of these ideas or something similar is getting the tools off your work surface, seeing which type of plier or cutter is which, and keeping them from banging against each other if you were to store them in a box.
This is also great – a lazy-Susan type organizer for your tools. It hold lots of different things and keeps them all within easy reach. Sometimes the compartments get over filled (If you don’t always put things back where they belong!), but a quick resorting does the trick so you can see what is where with a simple spin.