Craft Room Organization - Mixed Media Center

I hope yesterday's memes made you smile. I think each Wednesday I will share some of my favorites. If for no other reason that when I went to my pinterest board in search of yesterday's pins, I laughed my hiney off. And it could use a whole lot more.


I know, I know. Usually you get an overall view of the craft area first.  Well, I'm not going to do that. I'm not doing it do be difficult, I just covered the surface of my desk area with important papers through the last month, my craft desk in a project, and my stamp desk in leftovers from Calvinball (hey, it only ended 7 days ago, don't judge!). ha.

Before we go any further I have to issue this disclaimer.
**We purchases an old farm house on 40 acres. The house needs to be completed rehabbed. We started with a roof, plumbing, electric and then the master bedroom. Since moving in, we just had a contractor come in and level the house (creating very large cracks in the finished master bedroom and in the kitchen, which I'd already painted because that was the very last room we'd touch) and re-do the other 2 upstairs bedrooms and the hall with foam insulation, some more electric work and new drywall. We are putting the wood floors in ourselves. So my craft room is not a color I'd choose myself. Plus I only have part of the room (a 6.5' x 12' space). **

Disclaimer over** Onto our regularly schedule program. A tour of how I store my mixed media supplies.

If you come in the door to the craft room and look directly to the right, you'll see my craft desk and then a bookshelf that sits in the corner with the shelves open toward the desk. There are some things on this shelf that will definitely be staying put and some things that I do hope to move.  The brown arrow in the photo shows my books on the bottom shelf that I can tear things from.  The orange bag on the floor is foam stamps (mainly alphas) that I had taken to the art journaling class I taught last fall/winter and haven't figured out how/where there permanent home will be.

 My mixed media cart. I actually got 2 of these at Michael's for lower than the price of 1. I kept one at co-op with class supplies. It now resides in my basement until I teach again.  But this cart sets beside the bookshelf.
1. Basically the art supply mediums, good brushes, pippettes.
gesso (white, black, clear), texture paste, gel medium, good paintbrushes, pippettes, collage podge, lidded container of water for cleaning brushes, Daddy Van's Beeswax (sometimes good for making a page not sticky), Polymer medium. oh, and my bleach pen.
2. Tools
 rubbing alcohol, pallette knives, foam brushes and working brushes (these were the ones I took to class), texturizers (skewers, toothbrushes, etc. spray bottle of water, old key cards
3. ???? (Just sort of things that didn't fit elsewhere or that will move)
dylusional paints, course salt for texture/technique, travel bin with colored pencil, gel pens, ruler,
My brayers and wavy paper tool (corrugator) will go on pegboard once it's up, but are in here for now.
4. Spray Ink
I have more foam brushes and 1" paint brushes that were for class in here too. But I hope to move them as well.
5. Watercolor Plus other
watercolor pencils, watercolor crayons,  and watercolor tubes, plus calligraphy nibs and gelatos,
6. Acrylic Paint
This is all golden or liquitex better quality acrylics.

 This is my craft paints.  See the wall above the media cart and on the other side of the craft paint, I'm hoping to put a large pegboard there. (insert smiley face) I <3 pegboard.  I also store fabric dye here - like adironack inks, lindy stamp gang flat fabios, and my lumiere's by jacquard. Oh, and my india ink.

This is a rubbermaid 9cube organization unit. I have 2 that I put back to back. Then my hubs cut a top for it. I can stand on either side to create. This  is the mixed media side.

1. various sponges for applying paint. This has more room. and can definitely be used more effectively.
2. Texturizers - bubble wrap, corrugated cardboard, vinyl designed table cloth piece, toilet paper roll, and a couple of lids, dry wall tape,
3. collage material - patterns, adult coloring pages, magazines.
4. My in progress journals
5. Encaustic material
6. old used tissue paper from presents and such, great collage material
7. XYRON machine and extras
8. extra adhesives
9. Other mixed media pads and journals to use.

Do you art journal or paint?

If you're interested in what other bloggers are doing check out the 2peas refugee April blog challenge.  You can also join in there as well.

Chuckles For You

Here it is Wednesday. During my life in the working world, "hump day" was usually harder for me than Monday. Monday was a fresh start to the week. But by Wednesday, I was just waiting for Friday.  Now, I'm a SAHHSM, stay at home homeschooling mom, which means I don't even look forward to Friday anymore.  But when I get a bit fried, I love a bit of laughter.  Today, I'm going to share a couple of my favorite memes with you. I hope you get a chuckle.

 This is one of my all time favorites. I could actually see my husband saying something like this to me, because he is the witty one.

I just saw this one on Monday.  I don't know why the play on words strikes me as SO funny, but it does.

Have a happy day!

It's a Girl Thing

NOT!  It's not really a girl thing. I thought it just made a cute sentiment on this page about the brand new adventure of learning to ride the lawn mower.

I used an Amy Tan paper pad on this one. And the "It's a girl thing" is a Show-Off stencil that I used stencil paste mixed with paint on.

Happy Tuesday!

Why Do I have so many scissors?

We know that as crafters, we have a tendency to collect supplies. We often talk of our supply of washi, flair, die cuts, etc.  Of course, when we talk of those supplies, I've never run across anyone who has 20 of the same kind of washi.  So last night while I was crafting, my little basket to the left of my table caught my attention.

There are 8 pairs of regular long scissors in here, no decorative. PLUS, my Cutterbee's (I have 2 pair), pinking shears, my red rubber stamp scissor, a small pair of embroidery thread scissors, and a rotary cutter!!!  I think it might be time to thin out and store some of the regular ones somewhere else.

Then I got to thinking, this doesn't even include my fabric scissors or rotary cutters or my kitchens scissors.  I think I might need a scissor intervention.

Do you have anything similar? Is it just me?

Blogging Challenge

Many people participated in February's Layout A Day. March held the Get It Scrapped Calvinball challenge to keep the momentum going or for those like me, to jump on the bandwagon.  What will we do for April???  Well, Melissa over at the 2 Peas Refugee boards came up with a blogging challenge. We aim for 21 posts in the month of April for our poor neglected and afterthought blogs. The posts can really be about anything.

If you're interested in checking any of the blogs out, here is the current list of participants.


Melissa (Mom)

ojyma

Flibbertigibbet



impearia

ellewood

 serenek

Journeyfan

irisheyes

Dreamsofnyssa

awesomegabi

 mjmone

anniefb

darkchami

Eddie-n-Harley

 lowdertiff

thracian

justjac

 daynaholm

 chunka

 stefdesign

 There is already some great stuff posted.  I can't wait for the rest of the month.

Calvinball Take Aways and final digi layouts.

As one who likes to mix it up in my scrapbooking, I’ve always taken pride that I can make a very simple page or a very heavily embellished page; that my page backgrounds could be patterned, colored cardstock, dark, kraft, white/cream; that I can use wet media or not; that my pages didn’t always look the same. –So -- My take away from Calvinball for traditional pages is how I create a page with less lazy factors thrown in.

• -         On almost 70% of my layouts I used my own handwriting, at least 5 patterned papers, and had at least 15 elements on the page, and some form of shine.
• -         On about 45% of my layouts I used a punch (not a die cut), stamping, veneer, paint/ink.

Since I was not letting the bonus point rules dictate what/how I created, I found this interesting and thought it would be a great to tweak it so that I could see how I use my supplies and what I truly use. Because although I do use doilies and washi and other things, I don’t frequently use them in the quantities that were needed for points on most of my layouts.  My electronic cutter is used frequently or my manual die cutter and those items weren’t tracked during this adventure at all. Neither was my twine usage, which I know at least 2 or 3 layouts had.

So I’m thinking of a checklist that I could check off items used per layout, maybe using hash marks if I decide to be analog or just upping the number manually in an excel spreadsheet. I’ll be working on it this month. I see it as a way to say, "hey, I haven't used a rub-on, I need to do so." or "all of my layouts have had pattern paper backgrounds lately, it's time to mix it up."

And here are my final digi layouts.

 

 Now to find the best place to print them. Plus I have the last few years of digi layouts that haven't been printed (whistling while looking innocent).

Calvinball Recap

My goal for Calvinball was to finish a swap which I did. And then to create 8-10 layouts.  I was hoping to work on the 2ps refugee stash and bonus and maybe the sketch challenges.  After that I hoped to tackle some much needed Christmas layouts. 

I started scrapbooking in 2002. My Christmas layouts consist of: 1 layout for my son’s first Christmas in his 1^st year album; 3-4 layouts from 2013 completed in 2014/2015; and a shutterfly8x8 pre-Christmas preparation book for 2008.  As you can plainly see, Christmas representation in my albums is sorely lacking.  Pre-calvinball, I printed photos for the rest of 2013 and for 2011 in hopes of creating traditional layouts and pocket pages.

After finishing my swap, I continued to create a total of 24 layouts: 13 traditional and 11 digital.  That’s a MAJOR WIN in my book.  Woo Hoo!! Now I didn’t get to those printed Christmas photos, but those 11 digital photos are all 2014 Christmas. 

For Calvinball you get points for production and bonus points for things used, team building, and marketing.  My overall total was 201.5.  My layout total points were 172 from that 121 points were from my traditional layouts and only 51 points from digital layouts. This means my average traditional layout points were 9 and my digital were 4.6. This isn’t a huge surprise as my digital stash is not as well organized and I tend to open 1-3 kits that I think go well together and create just within those elements, using a pre-designed template. Cuz my digi skillz need some improvement, yo. (sorry, don’t know where that came from.)

I created my layouts as I normally would have, although knowing I was getting a point for using the embossing folder or a point for paint/ink, or for stenciling, definitely helped me not be lazy and include the item if I really wanted it there in the first place. The only thing it didn’t help me get over lazy wise is hand stitching. I love the look and would love to include it more, but it’s time consuming and, did I mention this already, I’m lazy. I have limited time to craft as it is, so I really want to complete my pages in a timely fashion.  

Although life also helped me out in creating those 24 pages, I was too sleep deprived to really do any major home projects (it took me a week to spring clean my living room) and my husband was traveling for 2 weeks for work.  I’ll be anxiously awaiting next year’s Calvinball and I’ll plan accordingly, so I won’t have the guilt of not doing the housework/home projects.  I highly recommend it as a motivator to create some pages. I can totally see doing something like this on our 2peas refugee board in the summer or fall.

Calvinball also gave me another idea which I'll share with you tomorrow.