Organizing Your Craft Space [Paperback]

Our craft room is a mess. We do a lot of crafts -- quilting, stained glass, woodworking, needlework. Most of the furniture in the room (built to be a bedroom) are castoffs from other parts of the house, or the inexpensive plastic drawers you get at an office supply company. We can never find what we want, and things are "stored" by piling them on the floor.

So you can imagine how interested I was in Organizing Your Craft Space.

I've mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it has a lot of great photos, showing different ways to organize craft rooms. After an introductory chapter, there are chapters devoted to each of several popular crafts: stained glass and mosaics, rubber stamping and stenciling, scrapbooking, paper crafts, beading, yarn crafts and needlework, and quilting. You'll also find photo spreads for "guest artists," people who do that craft professionally, showing how each individual organized her work space.

You can learn a lot by looking at the pictures, and getting your own ideas from them. Even though I found that most of the rooms shown were "let's look pretty" rather than "let's get to work," I had at least one "Aha!" of my own. (Perhaps I can better organize my fabric stash by using one of those hanging closet dividers! And the tip of using metal tins with magnets on the bottom *might* be useful.)

That's a good thing, because I don't think you'll get a lot of inspiration from the text. I had expected a lot more practical guidance, not suggestions like "Categorizing books should be accomplished according to a system that works for you."

For instance, one problem we struggle with is finding a way to store large sheets of glass; the section on stained glass showed a photo of a craft room with a space built-in for the purpose, but did not include any discussion of the criteria in designing your own solution. If I have a large sheet of red fusible glass, a smaller sheet that was cut from it, and some red scraps from previous projects -- how can I inventory them so that I don't look for the glass in three places, or cut down a larger sheet unnecessarily? This book gives me no clue; I'm no wiser than when I began.

I don't think the book is useless, not by a long shot. Some of the general suggestions are worthwhile, though I'm not sure you need to be told to label boxes or to separate items by function. Even if you "know" something, it can help to have someone remind you -- with examples. The photos can provide some inspiration, too.

Would I recommend the book? Hmmm... it's okay. I enjoyed looking through it once, maybe twice, but I don't think it will have a long term effect in getting our own craft space organized.

Straightforward advice to organizing your craft space. The book is divided by type of craft: rubberstamping and stenciling, scrapbooking, paper crafting, quilting, stained glass and mosaics, beading, and yarn crafts and needlework. Rooms belonging to guest artists are featured with interesting, but perhaps not unique, storage ideas featured. (The guest artists included Dee Gruening, Anna Corba, Sandi Genovese, Freddy Moran, Susan Pickering Rothamel, Suze Weinberg, and Linda Woodward. Note: no beaders, knitters, crocheters, or needleworkers.)

Ultimately, most of us are probably cross-over crafters and we'll all find something useful in this book about organizing our particular mix of supplies.

Starting with a remedial schedule for organizing your room, quizzes follow. These "personality assessments" suggest style and color for you to use in creating your space. This was the least helpful section.

Styles range from the galvanized steel workshop to pretty shabby chic rooms where supplies are displayed like collections. There is the wild, colorful style of the quilt artist and the sterile wire baskets and butcher block counter look. One room even looked like a store. Gives new meaning to shopping in your own stash!

There were no suggestion for locating the storage or other items used in the rooms.

I am primarily a needleworker, and I was a little disappointed with the suggestions they had for storing needlework supplies (although I suppose we have fewer different types of supplies than scrapbookers, for example). Storing spools of metallic thread in jars may be pretty, it's just downright impractical. There were some other suggestions that I found impractical but others might embrace (like organizing books by color). Most of the "spaces" shown are full craft rooms or studios, but they did feature one or two spaces that are parts of other rooms, in one case part of a bedroom. Something for everyone in this book.

Jo's book on organizing is good - but if you can only get one - get the Where Women Create. You can see a lot of the ideas in the photos in the other book.