Hello crafty friends! Craft room organization is a very important topic for any serious crafter and, admittedly, we love organizing our supplies almost as much as we love crafting with them! We both have recently renovated a space in each of our homes turning them into dedicated craft rooms. As a result, we have put a great deal of thought into choosing efficient solutions for storing our supplies that work in our individual spaces and, more importantly, don’t break the bank. We thought it would be fun to share our ideas for craft room organization and provide you with the specific details of the solutions that we are very happy with in the hopes that it might help one of you. Because craft room organization is too large of a topic to cover in a single blog post, we decided to create a series of posts over time to share with you. Today is the first post in this series and it’s all about ink pad storage.
Finding a good solution for storing our ink pads was one of several challenges we faced in our craft room renovations. But before we get into the solutions we settled on, we thought we would review the options that we considered and why they didn’t work for us.
Full-sized Ink Pads: A popular solution many crafters use is the slotted shelving unit that mounts on a wall. We really liked this option because it enables you to see everything at a glance making it easy to quickly grab what you need. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the wall space to entertain this option.
Mini Ink Cubes: One solution we used for a short while were the Tim Holtz Mini Distress Ink Storage Tins. We liked the portability of these small tins and they fit nicely inside any cabinet or drawer. The downfall for us was that a tin only holds 12 mini cubes, so we needed many tins to accommodate our collection. Another popular solution we gave serious consideration to are the trays that can fit inside larger cabinet drawers like the wide IKEA Alex unit. We liked this option because of the number of ink cubes you can store in a single tray as well as the portability of the tray. Unfortunately, we didn’t end up with cabinet drawers wide enough to accommodate these trays.
So that brings us to the solution we landed on which works for ink pads of any size and shape. One solution for ALL our ink pads! It is the Slim Project Case by Recollections (a Michael’s* brand). This is what we LOVE about these cases:
- The number of ink pads it can hold. Full sized pads (at least the brands we own) are generally stackable so depending on the size and shape of the pad, each case can hold: 24 full sized oval pads (two pads deep); 24 3” square Distress Oxide pads (two pads deep); 20 full sized rectangle pads (two pads deep). When it comes to mini ink pads, each case can hold up to 67 of the 1″ x 1″ cubes or 30 mini Catherine Pooler pads! Each Slim Project Case measures approximately 13″ x 12″ x 1.6″
- The price point. These cases are almost always on sale for under $7.00 each.
- Their portability. It is easy to transport these cases to your work surface or take them with you to a friend’s house or a group crafting event.
How and where we store these cases is just as exciting to us as the cases themselves. We discovered that they fit perfectly inside the very popular 13″x13″ cube shelving units like the IKEA Kallax units. The cases have slightly recessed tops which are designed to enable the cases to neatly stack on top of one another without slipping off. You can fit 9 cases in a single 13″ shelf cubby!! So, let’s do some math – 9 cases can hold a total of:
- Over 200 full-sized ink pads OR
- Over 600 mini ink pads OR
- 144 large ink pads AND 200+ mini ink cubes
That’s a TON of ink pad storage in one small 13″ cubby! Do you see why this makes us so happy??
There is also one more solution we wanted to share with you for where to store these cases. Michael’s* sells a modular slotted tower unit on wheels called the Modular Mobile Panel Tower by Simply Tidy. The Slim Project Case fits perfectly inside each slot. You will need to purchase two additional sets of shelves if you wish to have a shelf for each slot in the tower as shown in our photo below. This storage tower is a little on the pricey side ($120), but if you are willing to be patient and wait, you can pick it up when it is on sale. We purchased ours during a 50% off sale promotion.
Well, that completes our post for today. We are super happy with our ink pad storage solution and are confident that you will be too if you decide to give this a try. Please let us know what you think in the comment section below. We would also like to hear if you have a unique storage solution that works for you and makes you happy.
Stay safe and happy crafting!
Maureen and Michele
*NOTE: We have no affiliation with Michael’s. The links provided in this post are not affiliate links – we simply wanted to point you to the exact products we are using.
3 Comments
Lori-Ann
November 14, 2020 at 11:48 pmThank you so much!!!
Rachel T
November 15, 2020 at 8:38 amThank you for this post. I have tried many of the solutions you mentioned and more! Currently my ink is in four different storage solutions! I think I might just give this a try!
Natasha V
February 20, 2021 at 2:10 pmWow!!!!!! This is so AWESOME! Such a creative idea!