My Stamping Space

I promised pictures of my stamping space today, so here they are! This is my actual stamping area. I have two tables (one 6ft and one 4ft) in an 'L' shape. The ink pads and paper file box are in the center of the 'L' so that two people can stamp at the same time and be able to reach most of it. My husband painted my room a lovely shade of moss/celery green for my birthday present this year. It was a total surprise because I came home after spending a week at my mom's with the boys and there it was! An awesome surprise birthday present!

This is the "office" side of the room. I am pretty much the only one who uses the computer at our house (aside from the boys sometimes) so the whole room is really mine. I am the Correspondence Secretary, as my husband says, so this is my space to keep track of all of that. I love that furniture...I got it at Target when we moved into this house. Simple and easily moved around if I want to change things up. I even built it myself!

This is my work area. I have it set up so I can reach most of my stuff from my chair. I have several of the drawer sets from Walmart and they work great for storing little things like brads, eyelets, and snippets of ribbon. I got the ribbon rack (and the punch one shown in the other photo) from ebay about 2 years ago. They are fabulous. MyCraftSolutions has a great store on ebay with lots of different configurations. They are very very nice and were great to work with. Unfortunately, my area is rarely this clean, lol!

This is a close-up of my ink caddies. I got these from a place called dzyntec.com. They ran a great deal of 10 caddies for $90. They said they were moving to a new location and didn't want to move the inventory. Well, they never reopened that I know of. I love love them though! I have them on an acrylic turntable that they sold. So I have a caddy for each color family. It holds all the ink pads and reinkers for that color family. I also have three more caddies lined up against the wall behind them. I use these for craft pads and other ink pads.

And last, but not least, my stamp storage. I have the crop in style store in style cube storage. I have two that have shelving. One I use vertically for stamping magazines, SU publications, etc. The other I use horizontally for extra cardstock, there is one shelf for each color family and a space for the neutrals and in color as well. The cubes with doors on them are for my stamp sets. I have them semi-organized by type: word sets, floral sets, animal sets, etc. It is not the most efficient way of storing stamp sets, but I don't ever have that many sets so it works for me. I try not to have over 80 or so sets at one time. I find it overwhelming and then I don't use them. So if I find I don't use a set, I get rid of it and get something else. I like to refer to it as recycling. Now most days, you'll find 5-10 of these sets stacked up on my table, lol!

So there you have it! That is my stamping space! I have found that having my own space and not having to put it all away each time (as I would if I was using the kitchen table or something) has been the biggest factor in my growth as a stamper. I don't feel so much pressure to create quickly because I can always leave it and come back later.

Now I promise my next entry will have an actual stamped item in it!!