Are you ready for our final day in this week-long series to a better organized crafty stash?!! You can’t stamp without a collection of ink pads, but having a full spectrum of color options translates into storage issues ... today the My Favorite Things Design Team has ideas for you though! Keep clicking to see how the MFT team manages their stockpile of this stamping essential.
The ink pad and refill storage system I lovingly refer to as The Wall 'O Ink (LOL!) I'm finally happy with (it's been an on-going struggle!) are the solid wood Distress Combo Holders from Stamp-N-Storage. They also have cubby holes to hold refill/reinker bottles and smaller cubby holes for coordinating markers. They come unpainted, so you can stain or paint them (or not!) as you'd like. I spray painted mine white. These are four of the 48-pad holders, stacked 2x2 and are sitting on a pair of teal (accent color for my studio) box shelves (found at Hobby Lobby). I wanted the ink pads to sit up off my desk, so the desk area in front of the ink pads could still be fully utilized. This area usually contains my stamp scrubber/cleaner and the current stamps and cardstock I'm working with, so I didn't want to have to push all that aside in order to get to the ink pads I may need on the bottom row. Plus, there's a little extra storage space inside the box shelves (the fronts are hinged and lift up)!
These ink pad holders sit against the wall of my U-shaped desk (thus The Wall 'O Ink reference!) and are nice and handy to the right of my stamping area. The teal shelves below the holders also provide a ledge, where I can keep an Ink Blending tool handy. The round refill bottle holes also hold the dedicated Ink Blending Pad for that color.
I love that these holders have space for reinkers and markers -- you can see my collection of Tsukineko Memento ink pads, markers, and reinkers down at the far end, on the bottom. Dew Drops ink pads also fit into the shelves:
Below you can see in the upper left of the photo, where my Distress ink pads, markers, and reinkers are contained (the original pad for which these holders were created) -- they sit further back into the shelves, flush with the edge. As you can see, these holders hold all types of narrow ink pads, including all of MFT's inks -- Premium Dye and Hybrid ink pads, their reinker bottles, and Pigment ink pads. Tsukineko's Delicata and Versamark pads also fit. All of these ink pads that are longer than Distress Ink Pads stick out just a little, making them easy to grasp.
I label the ends of all my ink pads with my Label Maker, so the color name is easily visible. There is also room on the ink pad shelf/cubby for its coordinating Copic Sketch marker color, OR a Ciao marker will fit into the marker cubby hole -- I only have one Ciao that matches the bottom right MFT Lemon Drop color, but you can see how it fits. You can find a free downloadable chart of Copic color matches to MFT's cardstock and ink colors HERE on the MFT Blog!
Next to my design team monthly new product file box (details on Monday's Stamp Storage Solutions) is another of my favorite ink resources -- my Copic marker chart (free download on this page of my blog).
Thanks so much for joining us this week, we hope you've enjoyed it and may have found some great organizational and storage ideas! Be sure to check back next month, when the MFT design team will return to our monthly Organization for your Creative Space series, to help you get even more organized throughout the rest of the year!
