Wow this week just FLEW by! We're at the last day of the 5 Days to an Organized Crafty Stash, and today we're focusing on how we all store our MFT Ink Pads and Refills. With 3 different types of inks and a TON of colors - I think everyone needs some tips and tricks on how to store them (whether you only have a few or you're a "gotta have ALL the colors!" like me LOL).
Make sure you check out MFT's blog post for a bunch of storage inspiration and links to the other DT member's blog posts with even more ideas - plus that's where all the giveaways are happening!
And if you missed any of my previous posts this week you can find them all here:
5 Days to an Organized Crafty Stash: Day 4 Card Stock
5 Days to an Organized Crafty Stash: Day 3 Die-namics
5 Days to an Organized Crafty Stash: Day 2 Stencils
5 Days to an Organized Crafty Stash: Day 1 Stamps
SO - MFT ink pads. They started out with just dye ink pads, in a multitude of colors, then have since added the hybrid ink formula and most recently a pigment ink formula. I LOVE having so many options but that also means I now own a TON of ink pads.
Up until a couple of months ago I just had all my ink pads stored in drawers of an IKEA Alex unit and had them separated by drawer. That worked OK until I had so many ink pads that I had them 2 and even 3 deep in the drawers and it was a pain to find the one I was looking for.
I'd been eyeing up ink pad holders from StampnStorage for months, and for whatever reason (mostly the shipping to Canada LOL) held off on getting anything. But then they came out with the slim ink pad holder and I KNEW that was exactly what I wanted.
I did some major purging and reorganizing in my little studio back in the fall and sold off a big furniture piece which freed up some wall space and also helped pay for the unit with the shipping.
I got the biggest one they make which is the 120 ink pad holder - it's perfect and I love it. It fits all the MFT ink pad sizes without wasting any extra space width or height-wise (which always made me hesitate with any other type of ink pad holder b/c I hated the wasted space - for me wall and/or desk space is at a premium!).
I got the wall mount version of this (there's one for the desktop as well) and it was insanely easy to hang. It comes with a separate piece and the screws and anchors and literally took me less than 10 minutes to put up.
It comes unfinished like all their products and I'm tempted to spray paint it white at some point. For now I don't mind the look of it though. I'm just happy to finally have my ink pads stored where I can see them and get at them easily.
One of the big bonuses for me with this unit was that it came with a bunch of blank narrow labels for me to add to all my ink pads. That TOTALLY made my day as I was dreading labelling them all. My (now defunct) label maker made labels too wide for the pads and it would have taken forever to make them all up and trim them all down to fit.
With these I just wrote the name of each ink onto the labels and slapped them onto the sides of the ink pads.
My only pet peeve with this is that other than with the MFT Pigment Inks I can't see the actual color on the sides - just the white lids and white labels. It's on my "to-do list" to either take a sponge dauber and apply some ink to either part or the whole of every label, OR to punch small pieces of the matching colors of card stock and adhere them. That way I can see at a glance which color I'm looking for. It's not a huge drawback but when you've got as many ink pads as I do and limited time to craft anything that speeds up the process is a big deal LOL!
As far as ink refill storage goes I don't have anything special set up. They're all in a 1" drawer in my desk laying on their sides to fit (making sure the lids are TIGHTLY closed - I had one leaking incident with my Blu Raspberry as I didn't have the lid on tightly enough). Again it's on my to-do list to put them all in a container right side up - but I need to punch all the matching colors of card stock to adhere to the top of the lids so I can see the color I need at a glance and that I'm not digging through them all to find what I need. For now though this works!
I've also got a random mini-mister that I made with water and some drops of dye ink refill from a previous project in there. I love my MFT dye ink refills for that - I can make my own custom sprays and watercolor with them too - not just refill the ink pads when they need it!
I hope that gave y'all some inspiration and thank you for stopping by every day this week! I am not near as organized as I want to be LOL but like I've said before it's ALWAYS a work in progress for me. I enjoy the organizing part of crafting just as much (if not more sometimes) as crafting itself. I just find that lately with 3 kids and another one on the way I don't have a fraction of the time I used to to putter around the studio organizing and fiddling LOL - but when I do I thoroughly enjoy it ;).
Make sure to head over to MFT's blog for today's HUGE (HUGE!!!) giveaway and your chance to enter!!!
