A few weeks ago I shared how I organized my supplies in our mud room, craft room or office (it’s a really versatile space), which you can read about here.  Well, I made a Target run and just for fun, went down the container aisle to find the baskets that I really wanted but were too expensive on sale, so I exchanged my black and white bins for the seagrass baskets.  I immediately fell in love with the clean look of the baskets on the ladder shelving!

As I started to organize the crafts into the baskets, I realized that some of the storage under my desk wasn’t being utilized as effectively as it could.  So I took EVERYTHING out of the baskets, bins and cleared everything in the space.  Then I left it.  I got way too overwhelmed with all of the supplies and paper and stamps and everything to even think about where things should go.

After the kids went to bed, I went back to the space with a clear head and was ready to get everything organized.  Whenever I get overwhelmed with organizing an area, I either have to leave and come back, or start with a super easy task.  I decided to start with the ribbon because most of the ribbon was on spools and could easily be color-coded.

Having a lot of ribbon, I decided to use an acrylic bin I had in the basement bathroom.  Since the ribbon is so colorful, I thought it would be a nice touch to the shelves by adding a pop of color!  I had some ribbon that wasn’t on a spool, so having read a great blog post about organizing a craft closet, I used Jen’s suggestion to clip ribbon with a clothes pin.  All of my clothes pinned ribbon is now housed in a seagrass basket, next to the colorful ribbon that is on a spool.

Then I went through my stamps.  I have a lot of stamps thanks to my Auntie Barb.  When she was cleaning out her stamps, I got to pick through the ones I liked.  I didn’t really sort them when I first got them, so now was the time to go through and categorize the stamps.  I decided to group them into three categories so they would utilize three drawers that are located under my desk.  I grouped the stamps into “sayings”, “winter and holidays” and “animals and flowers”.  I got these categories by looking at what the majority of the stamps were and grouping like items together.

Finally, I put all of the envelopes, tags and stationary into this acrylic holder from the Container Store!  In an effort to be more efficient with writing notes, I thought putting stationary out might help!  You can read how I plan on doing that here.

Once the stationary was organized, I decided to put all of my office supplies in the top two drawers under my desk.  This would make grabbing tape or a hole-puncher much easier.

I still had so much stuff to go through, so I thought this would be a good stopping point and finish the following day.  There was a lot of random supplies that I needed to think about what I wanted to do and where to store them.  I also had to go through all of my colorful paper.  A part of me wanted to stay up and finish, but I knew I would be super crabby if I didn’t get sleep.  Sometimes it is best to leave a situation to gain some clarity as to how to best utilize the space!  Stay tuned for more updates!