scrappiness...

As promised...my scrap bins. Nothing too exciting here. These bins are from JoAnn's (used my 40% coupon, of course). They are 12x12 self-contained bins with locking lids, housed in a shelving unit so they stay all organized.

So here's how I use them. Last year sometime I went through all my paper...random scraps and all...and I organized them into colors. All the red went with the red, blue went with blue and so on.

Then, because of limited storage, I had to group certain colors together. So my drawers are: (1) red/pink/orange (2) yellow/green (3) blue/purple (4) neutrals (5) Basic Grey (yep, I use it enough that it gets it's own category) and (6) special occasion (for holiday papers).

The pieces that are least 12" long get pulled out. I store them with my full sized papers because they can be used as a border on a layout. All other pieces are stored in the scrap drawers/bins.

Now...I had a LOT of scraps. And I finally decided that anything that was smaller than about 4x4 had to go. Hard decision. That's a lot of paper. But I know myself. I don't use scraps a lot. So there is no sense in keeping small scraps. I either pass them on to my crafty kiddo or I *gasp* throw them away. Some times I package up a large amount of them and they find their way to a Cricut owner or two.

Inside the drawers it's really all hodge podge...just thrown in there. And you can see...sometimes I don't get rid of the little pieces. Depends what kind of mood I'm in. I actually need to thin out my scrap bins....they are starting to get a little full.


And the full size sheets and larger scraps go in my Cropper Hopper paper keepers. These sit on top of the large bookshelf in my scrap room...they are right there for me to stand up and grab whatever color group I am working with and peruse my options.

You'll see that they aren't really full. Several years ago I purged a ton of stuff and realized that I buy way.too.much. I know, it's a scrapbooker thing. But it was stuff that I loved on sight, would buy and then it would just sit there. Then it would be outdated or I didn't love it as much...and I would purge it. What a waste of money.

So my new thing is to only buy things that I have planned a layout for. It works nicely. I really only deviate from it a few times a year...for something I can't walk out of a store without. But over the last couple of years it's gotten easier to walk out.

If I'm totally in love with a piece of paper, I come home and plan a layout to use it on so I can justify it's purchase!

Basically what is left in those paper keepers are leftovers from my Green Tangerines work and a few must have papers.

Did that answer your questions? How do you store your scraps?