Time to organise

I don't know about you but I have a large (ok huge) pile of sheets of paper that I've ripped out of magazines or information sheets that are sitting in a heap in my craft room waiting for me to do something with them.

So after doing a bit of a tidy up in my craft room I decided that I had to go through that pile and first decide which ones I wanted to keep and then how to store them so that it would be easy to get to and therefore use.

The idea I came up was to first organise them into groups and these are the ones I've gone with.

1. Tips , Techniques and Product Information

2. Colour Combinations

3. People, Suppliers and Websites

4. Project Ideas (off the page)

5. Papercraft (things to make)

So now how to store them?

I could have bought some lidded storage containers but I didn't want to ruffle through them everytime looking for something.

Display books? Just slip the info into a sleeve. What about all the little bits of paper? They don't have that many pages.

Anyway what I did was go out and buy 5 Art Journals. If you look around with the Back to School catalogues you can pick them up cheaper than normal. The reason I chose art journals is that they have thicker pages so it will take gluing and inks etc if you want to work out colours in them.

The ones I bought have a plastic cover and I thought I would colour them up and maybe add some stamping. I've brushed on some gesso to give the paint/inks something to cling to and I'll show you what they turn out like. It may not work so they may end up with a decorated sheet of paper stuck to the front cover.

 I was merrily gluing in some pages in the Tips-Techniques & Product Info when I came across 3 pages I had torn out of a magazine. Hmm they has information on both sides, what to do.

Front of art journal (looking pretty dull at the moment)

Trim up and glue in the first page (if it doesn't have info on the back).

Trim down your magazine page and slide into a plastic sleeve.

Cut off the top of the sleeve along the magazine edge and fold over the side with the holes to along the page edge and crease with your thumb nail or bone scorer.

I added two peices of wide double sided tape down the edge of the folded over side.

Take off the top layer on the tape and stick into the art journal. I made it so that the "holey" folded over side was next to the spiral as I think it will sit better but it mightn't make any difference.

Now you can open it out and see the other side of the page. I should have taken a photo of that sorry.

Oh and forgive the quality of the photos, I should have put it on a darker background.

Anyway I've been madly gluing things into my art journals/information books which has made me feel all organised and happy with myself. Plus I get to go through my magazines and any that only have a few ideas in them get to be torn apart and the excess thrown away.

I just need to keep it up and then use them as a resource book for when I hit a wall. You know what I mean, the curse of the blank piece of cardstock.

How do you store your bits of paper?