I love my work space, and here is one big reason why. When you walk in to my craft room and look to the wall on the right, I have two large storage units. There are three drawers at the bottom of each unit. The left unit drawers contains all of my scrap fabric neatly folded and relatively accessible, especially when compared to previous methods of storing scrap fabric. Those methods have ranged from large garbage bags to gigantic plastic bins. The older systems were cumbersome and finding a specific piece of fabric was a challenge, not to mention both systems were messy--fabric wouldn't usually stay folded. With the drawers, folded pieces of fabric are at most 2 layers deep, so I don't have to do a lot of digging to find things. On the right unit, the drawers contain all my yarn; the bottom drawer is a little messy because one of my cats has discovered how to open it, and at night, he likes to select a "kill" and deposit the dead yarn ball at the door to my bedroom, usually along with 1-2 socks (singles, not matches) and an odd pair of underwear pilfered from one of the kids' laundry baskets. My goal over the next year is to use enough of that yarn to reduce it to 1 drawer, and then I'd like to use the other 2 drawers for more scrap fabric--I still have 2 buckets of scrap fabric that needs to be sorted, folded and put away.
Above the drawers, in both units, are four shelves. These shelves contain my in-progress project buckets and odd costume accessories. The project buckets were an idea I started about 10 years ago, although it's only been in the last 2 years that I've actually started using it effectively. Each bucket contains all the materials for one project, whether it's a costume, a quilt, an afghan or whatever. This way, when I want to work on something, all I need to do is pull out the bucket for a project, work on it, and then when I'm finished working, I put all materials and progress back in the bucket and return it to the shelf. When the system works, it means I spend less time looking for things or trying to remember where I left patterns (or zippers, or any other small thing that I could easily misplace). There are a few projects sitting loose on the shelves, mainly because I ran out of my project buckets--maybe it's a sign I need to go back and finish a few things--although there is one project that would not fit in one of the smaller buckets.
In between the shelves, I installed a closet bar. Here I have hung up all of my finished, or mostly finished, costumes that I plan on wearing in the near future. I would need considerably more space to store all of my completed costumes from the last 12 years. I've also hung up some of my favorites from my collection of kids cosplays--like Logan's Edward Elric costume that he wore when he was 3 and Ty's Vash the Stampede costume which he wore at 3 as well. In the collection of cosplays that I have kept out are both of my Ragnarok Online costumes (priestess and high priestess), my husband's Ragnarok Online high wizard costume, my husband's Link my Zelda, my White Mage robe, my Fluttershy and our Mai and Zuko A:tLA costumes. There are a few others hanging up there, but that's most of them. Believe it or not, I have two enormous buckets of costumes packed up in the garage. XD I should probably get rid of some of them, but I have a hard time letting go of things like that.
I got both of these storage units from the closet section at Ikea. The biggest challenge to installing these units was the fact that I left the back off of them; I wanted the purple on my walls to show through where the back would show. This made the units slightly unstable. After trying several things to stabalize them we ended up just nailing them into the wall, and even that took several tries because of how the units were built and where the wall studs were. In the end though, it worked out, and I am exceptionally happy with how they came out.
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