Monday, March 31, 2014

Organization Inspiration - Part IV: My Beads - Part 2

I bought these stacking Sterilite drawer units at Walmart. I use the shorter tower for storing my main seed beads and the taller tower contains mainly my backup supply for refilling the tubes in the other tower.

Starting with the beads in the shorter tower:

This drawer contains my metallic seed beads, mostly 15/0's. I like to store my 15/0 seed beads in small tubes rather than the large ones. The ones on the left side are all 15/0. The ones on the right are other sizes that I only have small amounts of.

These are my colored seed beads, somewhat sorted by color. By the way, the tubes fit quite well in the drawers because the little hang tabs on the caps are able to overlap in the center.

This drawer holds my metallic 11/0 seed beads in various shades of bronze, copper and silver. I found out the other day that I need to be VERY careful when pulling a tube out of the drawer. I apparently caught the edge of the cap on the underside of the frame of the unit and it pulled off the cap. Luckily, the beads all went into the bottom of the drawer and not on the floor. The crazy thing is that I'd never done that until just recently and then I did it twice. I suspect that the caps are starting to get looser over time. In any case, this drawer is getting a little too full but I don't have space for another drawer unit.

This drawer contains my metallic 8/0 and 6/0 seed beads as well as any other colors in those sizes. There are also a few non-metallic colors in 11/0. This drawer is very full too.

The bottom drawer contains a big assortment of seed beads of all sizes. Because they are medium size tubes, I had to arrange them in the drawer differently than the large and small tubes. I also had to put something in the back of the drawer to keep them from moving around too much. I got all of the beads in this drawer from Deborah Roberti. She was cleaning out her bead stash a while back and wanted to get rid of anything that wasn't labeled with the brand and/or color numbers. So, she graciously sent them to me, all 8 pounds of them! 

This is just a small sampling of what she sent me. I have a few others in bags in the other drawer unit and I sent a bunch of them to Teejay. Deb did label the bags she sent them in with the sizes and I've come up with my own names so that I can remember what I've used in my projects. So, whenever I post the "ingredients" for a beadwork project here and say "no info available" for the colors, they are probably from this stash from Deb.

And now for the taller tower:

The top drawer in this unit holds refills for the tubes in the other tower.

In this drawer, I keep refills for the  tubes of beads from Deb plus a few colors that aren't in the tubes because I didn't have enough tubes for them.

This drawer is a hodge-podge of beads in unknown sizes, mostly sent to me from England by Teejay. The beads that they sell in the shops over there tend to be unusual sizes that I never see for sale over here. Some of those larger ones make nice center focal beads for bracelets such as "Russian Snake".  The gorgeous bright blue beads in one of the bracelets in that post are from Teejay.
This is a refill supply for my metallic beads. These came in tubes so I left them that way.
The bottom two drawers contain a wide assortment of specialty beads such as drops, cubes, 6mm druks, tube beads and more. Since I don't use those kinds all that often, I don't mind having to dig through them to find what I need. The drawback is that I tend to forget what all is in those drawers.


4 comments:

  1. I am very envious of your organization! I can't ever seem to get there 100%.

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    1. I have to be organized because I live in a very small house.

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  2. I like how you organized your beading materials and always interested in organization tips. I’m thinking 6 years later you have a lot more beads and are organizing some differently. Would you consider doing it again?

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    1. Hi Kerie. It actually hasn't changed all that much except that I have added a couple more of those Sterilite drawer units so that each of the two "towers" now has 8 drawers. I have also added more of those Snapware containers under the coffee table. There are now nine stacks of them and they go all the way across underneath the table. Two of the stacks are behind two others but I've memorized which containers contain which beads pretty much and I always put them back in the same place to avoid confusion.

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