Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Creatively organised or organised creation

Those who know me well realise when it comes to left/right brain dominance, I am split right down the middle.

I love order and colour, planning and spontaneity, control and freedom. I like a place for everything and everything in its place, but prefer it to be in colourful spleandour rather than behind closed doors.

This "whole brain" approach is most visible in my art room. I store like with like, but that might sometimes refer to the use and sometimes to the colour. I abhor packaging, love re-purposing and care not one bit for brands!

As I have opened up my creating to expand from scrapbooking and embrace art journalling, the urge to organise my new tools and supplies began right from the moments of purchase. The rainbow is my palette and those colours call to me to be seen. My favourite colours - purple and orange - are my base in wardrobe, decorating and creation and the colours which harmonise with them attract me.

I was really happy with how my room had evolved for scrapping. You can see lots of photos here to see the storage options and layouts that still formed the base of the room - and still do, just added to and a little reorganised. You can see my former space AKA the dining room in 2008, where many of the storage options were already in use.

So - first, just a couple of before photos. I am really bad at taking before photos, because that is the cringe-worthy point for me: if the space is bad enough that I must reorganise it right away, then I am most likely embarrassed for it to be seen by others. But in the public interest ...




Functional but cramped and crying out for better use of space.

As you can see in the video of my work over Easter, I added an extra desk. But I also want to show you some of the smaller details.

I have a few basic organising rules which I try to apply everywhere:

"Store like with like"

"Make it easy to discard what you don't want"


"Think outside the square"



"Keep only what you know to be useful or believe to be beautiful"

"Location, Location, Location"

"Don't overlook the obvious"

"Respect the needs of those who share your space"


My space is like a game of Monolopoly or Lego - never really finished! This is how it is right now.


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