As the week
rolls on I find more and more to clean, sort, organize whatever you want to
call it. While most of the drawers and
such have been previously organized during the big culling event last year
there are odds and ends to deal with on a daily basis. I have a huge feeling that
once the room is “completed” I’ll be going back through those drawers real soon
and culling more as well as tidying up more in them.
Some
organization is for convenience once I get into full production on cards,
scrapbook pages, charts and such more than storage. One such item was the swatch tags I did today
as my project. I decided to start them
now before my embossing folder collection grew too large.
Again this
is an idea I scraplifted from various sites and then tweaked it to my
needs. Most of these swatches I have
seen are done on a hinged type circle key ring and in solid white. I chose to repurpose what I already had and
expand the thought a bit.
Basically
these are samples of each embossing folder I have. I made my sample cards out of white
cardstock, just as everyone else has, but I also put lavender dividers in for
ease of use in the future.
Let me back
up here and explain how I did it a bit better.
You could use ready made tags for this project if you like, but I have
the Plantin Schoolbook Cartridge for my Cricut machine and it has a nice tag
shape in it. So I cut my own.
Setting the
machine to make 4” white tags and using the fill the page feature I was able to
easily get eight white tags out of each sheet.
If I had cared to work at it a bit more I could have got ten, but I was
in a hurry and had plans for that additional cardstock on the edge that wasn’t
going to be cut for tags.
I cut enough
to make two full sets of the swatches, plus a few extras to use in the
future.
I chose to
make two sets for sheer laziness in the long run. I wanted one set to keep in the craft room
for when I was designing projects and another set to leave in my truck for when
purchasing folders to help me avoid purchasing duplicates.
On the back
of each tag I wrote what brand it was, the name of the folder and the
size. Then I embossed it. One of each folder for each set.
Once I had
completed all the folders I then changed my cutting size to 4.5” and switched
to lavender cardstock. This allowed for
six per sheet with the excess on the side for the future project.
These tags
remained unembossed, but instead were labeled on the bottom edge with the
different categories I file my folders under: celebrations, fauna, flora etc.
Next came
binding the swatches together. This is
where my repurposing came in. I did not
own any of those hinged type key rings, which I believe are called book rings, so I looked around for alternatives.
I had just
culled items under my bathroom sink earlier that day and came up with a ring
that previously held elastic ponytail holders.
We are a bunch of long haired people here so we purchase a lot of those
bands.
By removing
the bead from one end of the holder I was able to easily fill it with the
swatches and the dividers in just seconds.
This was destined to become my traveling swatch set.
No second
ring was available at this point so I grabbed a scrap of lavender with white
polka dot ribbon and threaded the second set onto it. This set will stay in my storage box with the
folders.
The longest
part of the entire project was embossing the tags, and anyone who does this
type of embossing that doesn’t take long at all.
The end
result is two sets of swatches that will allow me to shop and plan with ease in
the future.
Don’t do embossing?
Then think about other things you do create with. You could make similar sets to keep samples
of colors of paints, chalks (be sure and seal with fixative so it doesn’t
smear), colored pencils, fabric. The possibilities
are endless.
Not a crafter? Are
you remodeling? Attach samples of your
wallpaper, drapery fabric, dabs of your paint, small photos of your furniture etc
to them so when you are shopping you have the exact samples you need to match
up to.
An additional hint here, that I’ve used numerous times
when trying to match fabrics, upholstery samples etc and I have nothing I can
cut a swatch from to haul with me.
Embroidery floss. It’s cheap, it
comes in hundreds of colors, every color and hue under the rainbow. Plus
it is very portable. Attach a good size
piece to the swatch card to haul with you instead of lugging sofa cushions
around like I saw one woman doing.
Whatever your need to match up, or to avoid buying
duplicates of these little swatch cards are very handy.
Jan who loves the look of these swatches and the ease
they came together in OK
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