Organizing Your Paper

I often hear scrappers ask each other how they store and organize their 12" x 12" paper, so I thought I'd share a system that has worked well for me. Over the past few years my paper supply has (somehow) grown exponentially, and I needed a way to organize it so that I would know exactly where to look to find the perfect paper when I was working on a page.

I first organized my cardstock by color, and then by the shade of that color. For example, I started with dark reds, added the medium shades, then the lighter shades. Next I moved on to orange and did likewise. I continued doing this for each color until I had sections for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, cream, white, and black.

My patterned paper was a little more of a challenge to organize. I looked through the papers, and realized that I tend to buy papers with similar designs. I decided on some major design categories of papers and started making piles. Your stack of patterned papers may be divided differently than mine, but these categories will give you an idea of how it can be done.

Solid - papers that are mostly solid colors, but are not cardstock
Stripes
Swirls
Dots
Plaid
Stars
Floral -papers with flowers or leaves as the primary design
Realistic - animal prints, wood grain, photographic scenes, etc.
Specialty Paper - mulberry, handmade, velveteen, metallic, etc.
Vellum
Embossed
Miscellaneous - anything that doesn't fit in the categories above

If I happen to have a large stack of one brand of paper, such as SEI Simple Sets, I keep them together in a separate section, rather than splitting up a set of papers that match each other so well!

Once they were all divided into categories, I organized each small stack by color. This makes finding the right color and style of paper much faster for me when I'm working on a page. If a piece of paper has many colors in it, I tried to categorize it according to the most prominent color.

With all of my paper organized, I needed a way to access it easily. I used to use two Generations Memory File organizers, which were very handy. They closed nicely, and had handles on them to carry them to crops easily. They also both fit inside my Crop-In-Style XXL which was very convenient when I transported my supplies.

I did outgrow those two Memory Files though, and had to look for a new alternative. Since I do most of my scrapping in my office, I decided that portability wasn't quite as important anymore, but cost was! I decided on a simple plastic container from Wal-Mart. It was the perfect size to hold my 12 x 12 paper in an upright position, so that I could see the color of the cardstock and pull out the color I needed without disturbing the rest of the pile.

To hold my patterned paper, I used a set of hanging folders inside a small plastic file container that I found in the office supply section of Wal-Mart. Each hanging folder holds a different category of papers. The weight of the hanging file container helps hold my cardstock in an upright position, so that it doesn't get bent or warped. In the extra space I had in the large plastic bin, I put my binders full of stickers, die cuts and templates. This super-bin has been a fantastic way to hold some items that can easily take up a large amount of space.

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