Paper Pad Mess

Since I've gotten into card making, I've stocked up on 6" x 6" paper pads. Their smaller scale works so much better for many cards. You get the full pattern on a much small piece of paper. 

What do I do with this mountain?? Seriously. It's ugly and looks terrible on my shelves. And then there's that whole problem with things falling over. Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. 

So here's my solution. I purchased the black plastic basket from Target. They are found in the kitchen plastics section by the dish drainers. My Target has them in black or white. The 6" x 6" paper pads fit in them perfectly!

To help with saving a smidge of space and not having to worry about the seals that hold the paper pads closed getting everything all sticky, I tore both covers off. My original plan was to just cut off the company name and collection name off the cover and put that with the paper pad. That's what I do with my 12" x 12" collections. I didn't like how that looked with the small pads since they stand up and the large collections lay down. Shuffling through them to find what I wanted was also not as easy since the cardboard piece would fall to the bottom of the bag.

So onto Plan B! I threw away the cardboard pieces. They irked me. They also weren't very neat and once there's cut up papers in the bags, it would be even harder to find the tag. I have about 834 million labels around here. I went with the Avery 8478 labels. They're made for 1/3 tab file folders. There is a template you could use if that's your thing. I just used an Ultra Fine Point Sharpie and wrote on the labels. All I put on the label was the company name and the collection name. This solved my issues.

How do I organize my paper pads? Same way I do my collections. They are all sorted by theme. Christmas, winter, autumn, Halloween, Americana which covers the 4th of July and anything patriotic, spring, summer, beach/nautical, boy, girl, baby, love (includes Valentine's Day), wedding, Easter, outdoors, pets, school, etc. 

The bags. They are an odd size. I originally purchased them for my Close To My Heart stamp reorganization project. More on that in another post in the future when that project is complete. 

The bags are 7" x 7" zipper bags and I purchased them from eBay. They fit both the Close To My Heart stamp sets and the 6" x 6" paper pads perfectly! I'll have to find 9" x 9" zipper bags when I get some 8" x 8" pads. 

Oh one great thing about ordering the bags from eBay. You can find people selling them in 100 count or 1,000 count. I went with the box of 1,000 since I knew I have a huge project in the works. 

Hope this works for somebody out there!