As some of you know I did A LOT of crafting for this year's holiday gifts. I used my cricut non-stop for months. Now that I'm giving my cricut a rest I have been putting things away in my craft room. If you've even visited my craft room you know that everything has a place. Well my cricut mats had a stupid place. I needed to find a better one. And although they were still sticky and usable the clear covers didn't always want to stay on. Oh yeah... and the 12x24 mats?? Big pain... literally.... they were too big to fit in most logical storage places. So, for the time being, they just laid on my desk. My husband gave me a gift card for Lowes for Christmas so that he could build me shelves in my craft room for my nick-knacks. Well within a day I gave him that card back to go get the supplies. The shelves were up in a few hours and I was in there filling them up. As I was organizing my shelves those mats were laying on my desk taunting me, "you have no place for us, you aren't a master organizer, are you?" and then it hit me .... a 3M hook!!! Super quick to put up on the wall next to my desk and every mat has a hook hole. BAM!!!! Jessie - 1, Cricut mats - 0!!!!
Next is how to organize your cartridges. There are a few different options out there. I'm just going to share with you what I decided to do. I took all of my cartridges and handbooks out of the boxes. For some reason I couldn't throw the boxes away so I packed them all up in a box, labeled it, and sent it to the garage. I choose to use the cricut binders (see below). They can be found at Walmart, Michaels, or online. They sell for between $20-$25 (any higher is too much). I had my cartridges in there in no particular order and got frustrated going through 3 binders trying to find the cartridge I wanted to use. And although this is my favorite cartridge storage option, while the cartridges are in the pockets it is difficult to read the title. So I took them all out, organized them alphabetically, and typed them into a Word document table. On the pockets I used a silver sharpie to number the pockets.
Now, when I want a cartridge I look in my scrapbook binder and see what number it is and what binder it's in. This saves A LOT of time. When I get a new cartridge I'll just add it to the end of the list. If I get a bunch of new ones I may reorganize.
So a little tid-bit about the handbooks.... at least one third of the book is some other language - pull that shit out and trash it... it isn't needed (unless you speak that language hehe). This will thin out your books and they won't take up as much room in the binder or where ever you decide to keep them.
Earlier I mentioned that my list of cartridges can be found in my scrapbook binder. This binder also holds idea pages, a list of what stickles bottles I have, my checklist of "items to take" so I don't forget something important on a scrapbook weekend away (I have forgotten REALLY important items - prompting me to make a checklist - I'll share the binder in another post). Anyway .... another thing in my binder is a sheet for each cartridge I own. I googled the cartridge in the image section, saved the images, and made a word document (shown below). This always me to flip through to search for an image.
Cricut tools - so when your mats aren't super sticky anymore and you don't have a fancy cricut scraper you can use a Pampered Chef stone scraper. Works perfectly to make sure your paper to firmly stuck to the mat.
