Frugal Fridays: Great Outdoors Title today only $1.00, get organized and sneak peek

Hello everyone,
      I hope you are all enjoying your Summer.  I can't believe it's almost July!  Time sure does fly by when most of my time is spent sitting my daughter on the potty and hoping that eventually she'll get the idea!

      Now on to the Frugal Friday special.  For today only you get my Great Outdoors title  for $1.00 only.  Hurry though the price will magically disappear when the clock strikes midnight EST Friday, 6/25/2010.   This title is great for hiking, boy and girl scout camp outs, even just lounging in the hammock!  Click words below to purchase.

Great Outdoors

CDT member Aussie Caz even used this title in a wonderfully creative way.  She used it in this digital scrapbooking layout.  I just love how it turned out..don't you!?!

Well I have been very busy on potty duty and other members of my CDT have been busy too so I don't have any other paper crafting projects to share with you.  But...you know I like to "blab" so I can't end this blog post here!  So please read on and at the end of the post you'll see a sneak peak at a digital stamp coming soon to the store and I hope you'll give me an opinion on it.


Yipee..eventually I am getting my very own craft room.  It may be a while until it's ready but I'm very excited about it.  So much so that I have started figuring out ways to organize all my stuff so I can be productive in my craft room.  So I figured I'd share my finds with you here so hopefully it will help you get organized and in turn you'll have more time to make wonderful paper crafting projects.

When I scrapbook and card make the very first thing I think about before I start the project is figure out my color palette.  So I thought about that when I began looking for organizational ideas.   I have a ton of embellishments and really need a good system to store them.  While googling I came across Nicole Heady's wonderful studio here.  She has all her embellishments grouped by color.  So when she needs a pink embellishment she grabs her pink box and she's good to go.  So I had two compartment boxes here and I set to work.

I just did this a couple days ago so I'm not sure if I'm going to like it but in theory it looks great!  Now all my ribbons, fibers, brads, buttons etc all  in one box.  So if I need a pink flower I grab this box..need a pink ribbon..grab this box too.  Now it's not an exact science as some of my ribbons have more than one color.  But since the boxes are all nice and organized and everything is visible it's not hard to look in each box if need be.  Rather than thumbing through many....many different boxes and stuff to find what I need.  Now for a little details on what I have in the box.

*small brads and eyelets are in little snap shut containers.  These were in a bead organizing box all colors together previously.  So I kept my eyelets and brads in these boxes allowing me to keep various things in one compartment of my pink box.

*larger patterned brads are stuck through cork boards keeping them nice and visible

*fibers are in mini zip bags.  I purchased a lot of fibers through E-bay many years ago they had each fiber in a mini zip bag.  I love this as it keeps the fibers contained, organized and untangled.  I plan on getting more of these bags for my other fibers..I saw some at Wal-mart.   They are also great for the small brads and stuff too...allowing for more than one item in each compartment of my box.

*Aren't those little rolls of ribbon cute!  No it didn't take me a lifetime to roll all those ribbons up.  I used a very nifty tool to help me roll them in literally minutes.  The ribbon spooler is sooo handy.  It is one of my favorite tools.  When the ribbon is spooled in this way you can fit soo much ribbon in a very small space.  Which is good for me since I have a massive amount of ribbon.  Can you say "ribbon addict!" 

I do see two problems with this method.  One I only have two of these boxes which I bought years ago when I first started paper crafting and all of my embellishments fit into these two boxes.  So now I need to find more boxes ....keeping my fingers crossed I can without spending a fortune.  I love these boxes because the dividers slide out giving me a bigger compartment.  Two there is no room to grow at least in this box!  I kinda went nuts with pink...did the red box and it's pretty empty!  I think that is because when I had a little girl after doing boy layouts for soo many years I went pink crazy!  So I thought about an alternative if it costs too much to buy a box like this for every color.  I could buy some of those plastic drawers and do one drawer in each color and use the zip bags, tin containers etc to seperate items.  I'd have to dig a little because stuff wouldn't be as compartmentalized but at least there is room to grow and I just toss it in the drawer when I get something new.  This would take up more room though.  I do  think this method  will allow me to see what colors of I need more of and what I shouldn't buy again....ummmm...like PINK!  So what do you think.  Do you give this method a thumbs up or thumbs down?

Okay now for the sneak peek I promised you.  I have been working on this monkey digital stamp and I think it turned out pretty cute.  I'm not positive I like the squiggles by the leaves.  What do you think?  Please let me know either in comment on this post or the chat box to the right top of this blog.  I want to include some sentiments too so hopefully I can get this in the store by next week.

I'll end this post with some Summer Fun!  Last year we had a big inflatable pool but it was soo hard to clean and my kids don't stay in the pool they keep getting out and stepping into the grass and mud making the pool water messy.  So this year we decided to get a kiddie plastic pool that is much easier to clean.  However, it wasn't too small as I couldn't fit it in my van when I bought it.  LOL!  Hubby had to get it with his truck!  The kids love it and I'm soo glad!  One of their favorite things is to make us soup and tea using cheap plastic containers, spoons and watering cans.  Gotta love it when simple things provide endless entertainment!

Okay gotta go..need to go on a compartment box hunt!  Have a great weekend!  Thanks for stopping by!
Shelly

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