Friday, May 4, 2012

Organising Embossing Folders

I saw a brilliant idea for storing Embossing Folders, I think on Pinterest. (My apologies to the person with the brilliant idea, I wish I could remember where I saw this, but it escapes me. If I find you again, I will give you the credit you are due.)
It was so functional that I've just set up my Embossing Folders in a similar storage system which I'm sure you will love as much as I do.
Previously I stored my embossing folders in their original packaging, so I could see what they looked like, mixed in with my dies in several shoe boxes. I didn't know what I had and at times had more than a little difficulty finding what I was looking for. In order to find a particular embossing folder I usually needed to pull everything out of the shoe boxes and search through them all one at a time. My storage system just wasn't working for me.
Then I found this idea which not only stored the folders considerably better, it also provided a means for me to quickly check the folders I had to find what I was looking for... like I said... BRILLIANT!!
First thing... get rid of the packaging, well put it into a box for re-purposing at a later date.
Second thing... Sort out all the different sixes of embossing folders and the collate them some how. I ended up with four groups - small (2" x 2.75"); medium (A2 size); large (5" x 7" and anything bigger) and finally borders (any for the edge of a page or a card). 
In collating them, I put themes together (mainly Christmas) and then sorted everything else by type - e.g. words, collages, nature, everything else.
I then cut up some A4 lightweight cardstock into quarters. The sample I copied from had used luggage tags, but I couldn't see any benefit of trimming the quarters down further, that just meant more work for me. Sure they looked pretty, but I'm of the less is more, stop organising, get doing school of thought.
I thought ahead a bit here, and labelled each quarter of cardstock before I embossed it, with the name of the embossing folder (and collection if appropriate) so that I could reference back as to what I had actually used for a project. Doing this before hand mean I didn't have to worry about where I then embossed and trying to leave space for the name.
The next step was to run every Embossing Folder through my Cuttlebug machine with one of the quarters of cardstock to give me a sample of what each folder looked like. I was able to fit 1 medium or large, 4 small or 5 border embossing folders per quarter.
I then labelled both the embossing folder and the embossed sample with a matching number. This means I can flick through my samples, find the look I want, check its number and go straight to that embossing folder as they are all stored in numerical order by size in ONLY ONE shoe box.





Like I said... a BRILLIANT idea!!

3 comments:

Gypsy said...

Awesome- I don't have any embossing folders but I can definitely appreciate the satisfaction in that.

Anonymous said...

This is great. The website you're thinking of is this one: http://craftingwithclass.blogspot.com/2009/07/organization-embossing-folders.html. She was the first person I saw who put the idea out there in the cyber world. Thanks for showing your creative space!

Unknown said...

Thank you for sharing the link with me. It's not the one I saw on Pinterest but is certainly a terrific tutorial on setting up the swatches for your embossing folders.
I will being looking at more of the person's posts!!