A tiny bit of organization (in a world of chaos)

First, a disclaimer: organization is not my best trait. In fact, I suck at it. Especially when it comes to all my crafting goodies. You probably won't ever see any lovely "here's my beautiful studio" photos -- unless you ask really nicely anyway.

But, inspired by a combo of frustration and Dawn McVey, along with a little help from Meg (who has also done some organizing lately!), one category of craft madness is now orderly: my dies! Specifically, my Nesties and my PTI dies. Here's what my nesties used to look like:

Um, that's a dollar-bin 4x6 photo album. This actually worked well, until I had more than, oh, two sets of nesties. In short order, it looked like this:

Not pretty. A big jumbled mess. And I don't have many sets, even! So, I took some advice from organized types over at Splitcoast, combined with Dawn's post, and decided I'd use a loaf pan and some vent covers. MacGyver, here I come!  

Luckily, Meg found her vent covers first, and gave me some Home Depot aisle-searching tips. Logical: they're near the vents. Not logical: the vents share space with water heaters in my HD, bathroom stuff in Meg's. Anyway, they were there! The package looks like this "placemat":

I didn't intend for Dexter to drink out of my glass. She has water-dar. Anyway, a pack of three goes for about $4.50. I only needed one pack, but I got two in case they disappear from the Depot.

Next, I cut some cardstock into A2-sized pieces, and cut the vent covers (which are very thin magnets) into 4x4.5" pieces. Some tacky glue brought the two together, and then I dug through my mess of dies to arrange them all in their newly magnetic, labeled homes:

Nice. My new "files" fit perfectly in a standard-sized loaf pan (got mine at a thrift store for 80 cents). For the PTI dies, which are solid and light-ish, I used smaller cardstock sheets and about an inch of self-adhesive magnet-on-a-roll for each. Like this:

These went into a smaller loaf pan (another 80 cents). Now the two loaf pans sit neatly, side-by-side, right next to my Big Shot:

I used my SU treat cup boxes as bookends. Oh, and Cuttlebug/Quickcutz embossing folders fit in a standard loaf pan too, so those went in with the nesties (the only die that sticks up are the long rectangles -- the rest fit!). Sizzix embossing folders are a tad too wide, so they're in a little basket (it's in the corner of the photo), along with the larger 5x7 folders. Whew! That took awhile to figure out, but  man does it work!! 

(PS: sorry for the cruddy nighttime/shiny flash photos!)

Now, for the rest of the studio....Oy.