Quilling Tips for Scrapbookers
by Alison from the About Scrapbooking Forum
Part III: Storage and Organization

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Article Navigation Page 1: Supplies Needed Page 2: Quilling Tips Page 3: Storage and Organization Page 4: Ideas & Inspiration

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Storage and Organization

When you first start quilling, it’s easy to keep your meager stash of quilling supplies organized, but once you start collecting a variety of paper and other items, it’s a much more difficult task.  Here’s how I solved my storage and organization woes.  I’m sure there are other equally good ways to get organized, but these ideas have worked well for me.

The very best tip I can give you for storing paper is to keep it in the packages they come in!!!  All of the paper I buy comes in long plastic baggies with the tag stapled to the top of them.  When I get a new package of paper, I tear the tag off and leave the paper in the baggie.  The reason I so strongly recommend this is because if you remove the paper from the baggies and put them all together, they will get tangled up, smashed, and ruined after a while.  In addition, it will be much more difficult to find a particular color of paper when you’re searching through the tangled mess.  If you make your own paper, I would suggest you find a similar way of separating your strips.

Another thing I recommend is to label each baggie/package of paper with the color name (if it’s not already labeled or you’ve torn off the identifying tag).  You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to mix up colors when you’re working.  I once finished making a bunch of quilled penguins, only to discover that one of them had a pale lavender belly instead of a white one like the rest of his friends!  It’s not hard to do, so when you’re done using a color of paper, put it back in its labeled package.

In order to keep my paper organized and easy to use, I store it in plastic shoeboxes that I bought at Walmart for 88⊄ each.  When stored in their plastic baggies, the paper fits in the shoeboxes perfectly.  I have three shoeboxes for paper—one for the first half of the rainbow (pinks, reds, oranges, yellows), one for the second half of the rainbow (greens, blues, and purples), and one for neutral colors (white, cream, black, browns, grays) and specialty papers (wider strips, sparkle papers, parchment papers, speckle papers, etc.).  When I’m looking for a certain color or kind of paper, I know which box it will be in, and I’m able to locate it quickly.  I prefer the rainbow method of sorting papers because some yellows are borderline orange, some blues are almost purple, and so on.  I don’t have to make a definite determination about what color something is if it’s mixed with similar colors, but I also don’t end up with all my papers mixed together to where it’s difficult to find what I’m looking for.

I keep all of my other quilling supplies (tools, quilling board, small pair of scissors, toothpicks, and so on) in a fourth shoebox.  I also bought a large Rubbermaid box in which to store the shoeboxes of paper and other supplies.  This keeps all the supplies together in once place.

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