Organization on the Cheap: Ribbon

Organizing your scrapbook supplies can sometimes be a tedious task. But it is an important one! Having your supplies organized can help speed up the scrapbooking process when you can quickly find what you need and match things up easier. It can also save you some money by not purchasing things you already have stashed somewhere!

Today I needed to organize my ribbon. I don't usually use a lot of ribbon, but from time to time I will add it to a page or make it a consistent feature in an album. But my ribbon box has been a mess for YEARS. And having this mess has actually made me use less ribbon on my projects, since it was so unorganized and I had no idea what I had. I didn't even want to look in that box for anything!

I really didn't want to spend any money to do this, and organization units and racks can get really expensive. Since I don't use a lot of ribbon, it wasn't worth investing in a ribbon rack, so I needed to come up with something on my own. All it took was my $2 photo box, a few pencils, and a few sheets of cardboard! I was happy to find that unsharpened pencils are the perfect length to fit into the photo box and would be the perfect thing to string the rolls of ribbon on.

I began by pulling out all of the rolled ribbon, and put them on the pencil dowels. This did not work as perfectly as I thought it would, due to lots of unraveling of the ribbon. I could have taped down the ribbon to the rolls, but chose not to - again since my use of ribbon is so limited. If you use a lot of ribbon and are in and out of the box all of the time, you may want to tape down the ends and save yourself lots of re-rolling!

Once I had the rolled ribbon all on the pencils, I needed to decide what to do with all of the unrolled ribbon. I decided wrapping it on cardboard cards could work. I cut out 3 pieces of cardboard to fit the size of the box, and began wrapping the ribbon the on cards. I did have to tape down the ends on these to prevent unraveling, but it was quick and easy and definitely worth the time to do. 

I was very happy with how the wrapped cards came out! I ended up needing to a fourth card to fit all of the ribbon, and did end up discarding a few small bits of ribbon that were too short to wrap or were just scrap pieces from used up rolls that I no longer needed. I tried to match up the ribbons on the cards by theme or color pallet, which worked out pretty well. If you have a lot of ribbon you could easily do one card per theme or color.

In the end, it only took me about 40 minutes to organize the ribbon box, and cost me nothing! Hopefully I'll be more inclined to pull out my ribbon box more often and use it. Happily, I only found one roll of duplicate ribbon in all of this!