Clever Craft Spaces – For Business Owners and Hobbyists 05.02.2016

@photo

Whether you run an arts and crafts business from home, or just enjoy the simple pleasure of crafting as a hobby, you can find that tools and materials spread easily from the small trestle table set up in the corner of the room to the dining table, the kitchen bench and even in the bureau in the living room.

To stop the ‘march of the materials’ apply some tried and well tested methods for creating clever craft spaces in your home so you can grow the business or pursue your hobby and get your house back.

Play To Your Strengths

Rather than focusing on what you don’t have in terms of space or storage, look at what you do have and how you can use it better. Source coat hangers, filing cabinets, shelving, bottles and boxes. Now look at items you might not have considered adding to your shopping list before, but which could add value to your storage solutions, such as magazine holders to store patterns, shower caddies to store wrapping paper, nuts and bolts divider boxes to store buttons, and spice or coffee jars to store beads.

Also remember, that just because you have always stored your beads in jars and stacked them on the overhead shelf, doesn’t mean you have to continue that way. Consider other versatile devices such adding beads to spice jars and installing a spice rack on the wall so that you can see the colours and sizes at a glance.

Assign Every Item a Place to Live

If space is at a premium, then designate key locations for items – pliers, scissors, glue, paper, ribbon, leather, material, yarn and other threads etc. Label drawers, boxes and other closed storage devices so that you can quickly identify what goes where. Review your supplies (and any future quantities you are likely to purchase) and assess how much storage you will need.

Place any new items in their homes as soon as you get them. Having a proper place for tools and materials means that when you are working you can quickly find what you need. As you start positioning them in your workspace, assess how frequently you need to access those tools or materials, so those used more regularly are within easy reach.

Identify your Pattern of Work

Take a moment to reflect on how you work with your materials. Do you need to find and use materials by colour, texture, or size? Ask yourself if you need to change the way that you currently store your items so that they are easier to access. For example, should you store:

• All of the blue (purple, green, orange etc.) yarn together so that you can compare shades, or
• Balls of yarn in groups according to seasonal colours, or
• Yarn according to weight, thread type or country of origin?

Once you have identified how you work, you will be able to structure your materials in a way that allows you to access each item quickly.

Crafting, whether it is for profit or fun, is resource intensive. You will always have plenty of tools and materials at hand, but by applying a few simple techniques you will be able to create a clever craft corner so that your kitchen table is freed up for the nightly family meal.