I started subscribing to
Studio Calico's Project Life kits back in March, and it's definitely one of the best decisions I've made for project life. The kits come with 3x4 cards, 6x4 cards, usually some kind of sticker, stamp, embellishment, or a variety of other things. The only thing that starts to get daunting, is trying to look at all of the stuff you have at once. They come in their own little box every month, and after seven months of little boxes, it started to create a lot of clutter.
Finding what I needed, whether it was a particular embellishment from one kit (and there's no way I could remember which kit I was looking for from week to week), or just looking for a card that matched a color scheme of a spread, was getting impossible. I decided that I needed to get all of my kits more condensed so that I could look at all of the cards at once, all of the stickers at once, or all of the embellishments. I bought a plastic bin from Michaels, and separated everything into categories (heeeeyyyy, type A Alessia), which made the chaos seem so much less intense.
I still labeled everything by what kit they came from, because when I do my weekly spread posts, I like to try and note which kit something came from. This is a step that is totally unnecessary, but I think it's nice to know which kit you're working with and when.
Once I had all of that stuff separated into the plastic bin, I used two of the studio calico magnet boxes to sort the 3x4 cards from each kit, and the other to sort the 6x4 cards, alphabet sheets, and other items that were too big for the plastic bin.
I didn't combine the cards together for the same reason I labeled all of the stickers and such, but I organized each kit in color order so that I know if I'm looking for a bunch of black and white cards they'll be at the back of the pile, or a yellow card, it'll be behind the pinks and oranges of a particular kit's cards.
Everything just feels so much more coherent, and so much more put together. Now when I go to do my spreads, I don't have to take out seven boxes, plus the other essentials that I normally use.
Because I was on a bit of an OCD cleaning and organizing high, I decided to organize my two core kits (
midnight and
seafoam) as well, because when I went to get the plastic container at Michaels, I got another kit (
dreamy) for half off with a coupon (and a free album for next year in a BOGO sale #win) and knew that I would need to sort out all of those cards.
I used to have the
seafoam kit in it's original box and
midnight in a wood photo box that I had laying around at the beginning of last year, but after almost a year of PL down, I knew that I could definitely fit all three kits in the wood box by taking out a few types of each card.
I took out a few of each card from all three kits, separated them within their kit by striped, patterned, grids, lined, and plain, and put them in the best type of color order I could so that every card is super easy to find. I was then able to fit all of the leftovers from all three kits into one of the original kit boxes, so that when I start to run low I can replenish what I have. I now have more than enough cards to work with for the next year, plus the studio calico kits that are still to come. And my type A personality is so overjoyed that most of those little studio calico boxes are gone.
