Organising Sprapbooking Paper and Photo Pockets

My next instalment of my series on my 'in progress' Creative Studio is my storage solution for scrapbooking paper, cardstock and plastic photo pocket pages.

Over the past tweleve months, I have decided that vertical paper storage really works for me.  Last year I organised my Recipes using a suspension file system, and I haven't looked back!  At work, I have my Black and White folders on a vertical stand, which has helped me to avoid a piled high in-tray.

So, when working out a way to organise my scrapbooking paper/cardstock, I thought 'vertical'!  I love my BESTA filing cabinets from Ikea, we have one that has two rows of hanging files (one row for home files and one row for my hubby's business files).

I also had one other entire cabinet sitting empty (just housing spare stationery), waiting to be filled with some lovely supplies!  Now, the thing is, cardstock is 30cm high, which is much higher than your standard suspension file.  Lucky for me, we had assembled only one rack for hanging files in this spare cabinet.  The file drawer was at the base of this cabinet, and we just had a shelf sitting on top of that.

In no time at all, I moved the shelf up a couple of notches and then I had plenty of room for my pretty paper!

The suspension files allow me to categorise my paper into colour blocks, and the fact that they are standing vertically, and poking out the top a little bit, makes it really easy to flick through and see exactly what I have at a glance.  Or alternatively, I can take the entire file out and spread the paper on the table to mix and match with other colours.

Once I had popped my paper/card into the cabinet, I realised I had plenty more room in there.  So, I decided to also add my plastic photo pockets into the files too.  I have quite a variety of pockets for my Project Life, and was struggling with the horizontal drawers that were housing them previously.

Wow!  A great organising solution for two essential elements of scrapbooking!  Still a long way to go in the study make-over, but now I am one step closer to my ultimate aim ~ having everything super organised and easy to access, so that when I am crafting, I have to think of nothing other than letting my creative juices get to work :)


Read more about our Study Makeover here.