craft room organizing

Making something beautiful requires talent, hard work – and good storage! We can’t help you with the first two ingredients, but we can give you some organization solutions to inspire your creative spaces. If you’re a crafter, painter, musician or woodworker, read on for ways to set yourself up for success.

Crafting

One of the barriers to crafting is simply having the room. Most of us don’t have the luxury of a dedicated craft or sewing area, so we have to get creative. Luckily, you can stow supplies almost anywhere with a few simple solutions.

Tuck away decorative paper, fabric, embellishments and other crafting gear in a storage unit like this Modular Closet kit.

Use fabric bins to contain similar items, like knitting yarn and needles or scrapbook paper and a guillotine, so that you can find everything you need for a project quickly. Plus, you can grab the entire bin and carry it to your craft table.

Identify your supplies with labels on the outside of their containers to make it simple to put everything back where it belongs. If you craft with your kids or grandkids, this will also help them to learn how to stay organized.

Painting

Whether you prefer acrylics, watercolors or oils, painting is a messy hobby. Make it less so with these storage tips.

Store your paint pigments in glass jars with lids, and place the jars on a shelf or in a wire rack. They’ll display beautifully, and you can see what you have at a glance. Arrange your paints by color to inspire you and help you grab what you need.

Reuse old aluminum cans or glass jars for paint brush storage. For a more decorative look, go with a planter or flower pot.

Allow sponges and other wet painting tools to air dry on Hideaway Hanging Shelves.

Hang palette knives on a magnetic strip on the wall to elevate them and keep them away from any youngster’s hands. If you paint on paper, string twine from one wall to another so you can suspend your artwork to dry safely.

Music

Being able to start playing or recording music immediately matters. You never know when a new chord progression or song lyric will pop into your head.

To start getting organized, ask yourself a few important questions. What do you need your music space to do? Will it serve as a recording studio, a practice room, a place to teach students – or all of the above? Or does it have to share its area with the living room, rec room or playroom? Once you know how it must function, you can begin planning.

Establish zones in the room, especially if it has to fulfill many purposes. Decide where to place the instruments first. Then, consider what other roles the space has to fulfill. For instance, you might need a desk to write songs or mix tracks. Perhaps you have a lot of sound equipment that requires special storage. If your music room is part of a larger space, put up hooks to hold instruments on the wall, freeing up floor space for a drum kit, a microphone stand, a piano – or the family room sofa.

A six-cube organizer can accommodate sheet music, albums and electronics like cords and mics.

Manage cables and power cords with clips or cable channels to avoid tripping hazards.

Woodworking

Your woodworking shop is probably located in the garage or in a separate shed on your property. While that might mean that you don’t have to keep it presentable in case guests see it, you still will want to organize it well for your own sake.

Figure out where any heavy machinery will go first. Remember to give yourself enough of a diameter around the equipment so that you can use it effectively.

Then, assess the remainder of your space and what has to fit into it. Do you have any other equipment that needs to sit on the floor? If there isn’t space, can you store those items elsewhere? What about large pieces of wood? Can you build simple storage for them?

A slatwall can hold many of your tools, from a hack saw to a hammer, without taking up any of your horizontal workspace.

Smaller tools can go up on a wall or in a portable box. Hoist bigger equipment into the rafters, if that won’t create a safety hazard.

Spend time organizing now so that you can spontaneously create whenever the mood strikes in the future. Your muse will thank you.