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The Holy Grail: An Organized Studio

Posted: Lis on Jul 15 | Business Topics

This week’s Etsy Bloggers theme is “a tour of your craft studio.” With all of the broken glass that I work with as a glass fuser, organization is the most important part of my studio setup. Here are some of my studio organization strategies.

Supplies Storage

When you’re a glass artist, you need to store a lot of glass. I picked up this storage shelf with bins at Target on sale for $39.

The larger bins are perfect for storing big dichroic sheet glass and glass lampworking rods that I use to make beads (although I’m very jealous of the pvc pipe setup that Kris Itokazu uses for her glass rods).

I use the smaller bins for storing smaller dichroic and art glass sheets, frit and glass fusing supplies.

Storing Unfinished Pieces

I make a lot of earrings and small cabs that need to be fired multiple times in the kiln at the various stages of their creation. I use a lot of plastic containers in varying sizes to store fused pieces that need to be shaped with the glass grinder and then re-fired. This is a small tupperware container with a lid that I use to hold dichroic earring cabs that need finishing. I have a another one in a larger size that I use to store cabochons for pendants.

Inventory Storage

For a while, sorting and organizing the little dichroic cabochons that I sell for use with precious metal clay was a total nightmare. At first, I just kept them in a box, and piled the 300 or so cabs of various sizes in different corners, labeled on the bottom of the box with a sharpie marker.

Then my cat knocked the box over and I learned an important lesson (no cats allowed in the studio - and also, the box wasn’t going to cut it). After cursing up a storm, I re-sorted the cabs into little zip-baggies.

I soon learned that while this method kept them organized, it made it hard to quickly pick out nice ones to fill grab bag orders without dumping out each bag. So I was pretty excited when I found this multi-compartment storage box at Home Depot for $5 (there’s a similar one on Amazon.com for $3.50). In fact, the compartments worked so well that I decided to buy similar ones for bead storage.

I am always looking for new ways to help keep my studio organized, so if you want to share any tips, please feel free to leave a comment! You can check out all of posts on this week’s theme at Missmalaprop.com.

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