Organizing Your Creative Space: Dealing with Seasonal Craft Supplies

When it comes to crafting, there are so many things that inspire us to make things.  One of my biggest crafting inspirations is celebrating holidays, and I’ll bet most crafters would say the same.  There are SO many crafts that can make them even more special.  Tell me….who doesn’t love to receive a handmade gift that was made especially for them?  There are also countless ways to bring handmade items into our seasonal decor.  Handmade pillows, welcoming wreaths and floral centerpieces are just a few examples of items that can be made to make our homes feel wonderfully cozy for any season.

Here’s an example of some Christmas crafting I did for our home. It is a collage of paper rosettes I hung in the kitchen for a party we hosted.

With all of these crafty projects comes lots of supplies that are made specifically for certain holidays and/or seasons.  If you are like me, you might have let some of those supplies mingle with your more generic items.  Inevitably, when that season roles around again you may totally forget about all of these “intermingled” supplies.

How do we tackle this problem?  Well, back in Part 1 of this blog series you might remember how sorting all of the crafty things into categories is the very first step.  I quickly noticed how many items I have that are seasonal in nature and I started adding them to a temporary box labeled “Seasonal Crafts”.

Now that my craft room is back in order, I had time to go back to this box and divide the things by season and/or holiday. I went through all of the items with a critical eye and edited out things that no longer inspired me. The key to finding these things when we need them is to store them with the other seasonal items.  If you have lots of items for each season like I do, then you will probably need to dedicate a container to each.  For example, I have a rather large bin that has a green and red lid that I labeled “Christmas Crafts”.  I also used a large bin to hold Fall/Halloween/Thanksgiving related supplies.  I purchased smaller color-coded bins at Target for Valentine’s and Easter, and labeled them accordingly.   Here’s a quick look the cute color-coded bins.

When I finish packing away all of the items in each bin, I plan to take them to the storage closet where I keep all of our seasonal decor and household items.  The best spot for them is in front of or on top of the other seasonal bins, so that they are easy to fetch when I want to start crafting way before a holiday rolls around (ok, so maybe this never really happens…but I like to know that I can easily access it if I get into the holiday spirit early).