Organize Your Bead Stash

I didn’t get much done while Geek was home. I did however make out like a bandit at Christmas!  I think that I got 8 Japanese Bead Books, and then two more American ones. My children picked out some beads for me, and I got a nifty little pc laptop to make posting to my sites go a little bit easier. I also got to go shopping for beads. I think I spent close to $600. I don’t do that very often, I was just very excited to get the supplies for some of the projects in my new books.

I think I spent two days combing over  bead sites and magazines trying to decide exactly what I wanted. I did my best to be thrifty and I thought I did pretty well until it started arriving in the mail.

I have slowly been collecting storage containers, but I had yet to sit down and organize anything. Not only were my beads a mess, but I had books scattered out over 5 bookcases.  I decided that I really needed to sort through things a bit. It was a frustrating endeavor but I am glad that I did it. I’m glad because now I can find stuff. I was frustrated after I figured out that I already owned a lot of what I had just purchased. So much for being frugal. It gets better, when I gathered up all of my bead books, I discovered that I had two copies of one of them. I also have duplicate copies of 4 or 5 magazines.

So I thought I’d share how I organized my bead stash. It is a pretty simple system. I think that it would make for a really long post though, so I will break it up in to a couple of entries. You will also get to see my work space which means that I am going to have to clean off my desk this evening! 🙂