Ribbon Organized!

Introducing Snickers. She is my sidekick and stamping companion. She thinks that my photo box is her personal domain and anything I am working with is fair game. I got lots of help with my latest organization project - go figure! All was fine and I didn't mind until she lunged at me to play with the string on my hoodie instead of the piles of ribbon. It just startled me was all. She is now back outside on her leash stalking birds, bunnies and shrews. Not much luck with the birds and bunnies, but she does manage to catch and play with several shrews a week. Unfortunately, she doesn't play well with others andthe shrew ends up dead by the end of the play session in most cases. At least she doesn't bite their heads off like another unamed kitty in this household..... Snickers is a tiny cat that tops out at around 8 pounds with her lazy winter weight and drops to about 7 pounds in the summer cuz there's no time to eat or rest!

If you know me at all, you know I love to organize. I can come over and help you, just give me a holler. Here's how this happened. I have all my smaller lots of ribbon on cardboard spools made using SU's round tab punch and they are in jars. Spools of ribbon are all in drawers in my roll top desk and cards with assortments were in a different drawer. Here is how my scraps were stored. Yes, that's a giant make up bag measuring 12" x 8" x 5". After dumping them all out yesterday to find what I wanted, I knew there had to be a better system.

I happened upon this neat expandable floss organizing system by Westex at Joannes. The binder is sold seperately from the zip bags. I bought 4 binders and 72 bags and put 18 bags in each binder. Now, all my carded ribbon assortments, fibers and ribbon scraps are contained and easy to flip through. I put them in my drawers like books opened to the middle and they are really easy to find what I am looking for at a glance. There is a spot on the bags to write a color or manufacturer, but I left ribbons on the original cards when possible. The actual bags are 3 1/2" x 5" and worked perfectly for my needs. I was able to eliminate the make up bag and an entire drawer with my new organization.

I hope I have inspired you to do some organizing of your own!