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How to Plan Craft Room Organization

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Whether your craft space is just one shelf or an entire room, knowing how to plan craft room organization will help you make the most of your craft storage.

neatly organized white bookcase with craft supplies

Often with craft room organization, people want to jump in and just start organizing. I understand. You’re excited and motivated and don’t want to wait. But taking the time to assess and plan craft room organization will result in the best craft room storage for you and your unique needs.

How to do you organize a craft space?

  • Gather All Your Craft Supplies in One Area
  • Declutter and Edit
  • Create a Budget for Organizing Products
  • Create an Organization Plan
  • Prioritize Use
  • Take Advantage of Vertical and Hidden Space for Organizing
  • Store Items in a Way That Makes Sense for You
  • Use the Space for a Few Week or Months
  • Reassess and Make Changes so the Space Works Better for You
painted metal drawers with label-makers and craft supplies

Plan Craft Room Organization

Before you jump into pulling everything out with the intention of organizing it, and before you run out and buy a bunch of pretty craft storage cabinets and organizing equipment, you need to take time to plan for your craft space.

If you hired me as a professional organizer to help you organize your craft room, I would ask you questions to assess your goals, your space, how you intend on using the space and what makes the most sense for you personally in your craft space.

Collage of 5 plan craft room organization checklist pages

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Here is your printable Craft Room Organizing Checklist pdf.

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collage of colorful organizing printable pages.

Assess Your Craft Supplies and Equipment

  • Gather all your craft items from all around the house and put them in one place.
  • Sort the items by categories, putting like items with like items
  • You’re not editing or decluttering yet, but if you do see something that you can quickly throw away, recycle or put in a donate pile, go ahead and do that. But don’t allow yourself to get distracted.
  • If you’re planning on purchasing or obtaining a piece of equipment or large amount of supplies, write this down on a piece of paper and sort it into a category to help you plan for it.

Asses Your Craft Space

  • Look at the craft items you’ve gathered and consider your craft space.
  • Answer the questions on Craft Room Organizing Assessment Worksheet.
    • Yes, I asked, “Will everything you want fit in the space?” twice on purpose. This is often a struggle for crafters. We have a tough time giving up items we’ve collected and think we might need in the future.
  • Use a piece of graph paper or a free app to map out where you plan on storing items in your craft space.
  • Start researching craft storage ideas or furniture that you’d like.
skeins of different colors of yarn stacked

Determine Your Goals

  • You could put this step first, but I like to have you determine your goals for your craft space once you have a good idea of what you actually have to fit into your craft organization.
  • Realistically, most of us don’t have craft spaces large enough for everything we would like to have and do in our craft rooms. You’ll have to prioritize your goals to help you in planning your craft room organization.

Budgeting

  • If you’re a crafter, you dream of those huge, gorgeous craft rooms you see in magazines and on Pinterest.
  • Set a realistic budget. While you may want to have a magazine-worthy craft room now, it may take you months or years to be able to afford your dream craft room.
  • Create a wish list of craft storage and other furniture that you can add to your space as your budget allows.

What Do You Need to Start

  • Determine what you need to gather now before you get started.
  • Boxes and bags for decluttering
  • Help moving boxes and items around
  • Do you need to schedule painters, carpenters or a friend to help you when you start organizing?

Next up in the craft room organizing series – Declutter Craft Supplies.

Craft Room Labeling Resources

Using UbeCube to Organize Craft Supplies

I was gifted UbeCube to to try for organizing craft supplies.

I received free products, but all opinions are always 100% my own.

I prefer to choose versatile modular storage options. This allows my storage to adapt as my crafting and organizing needs change. And also as I move again and again, thanks to the military.

I chose to use 4 UbeCubes to organize craft supplies. I’m not very tall, so I found this the perfect height to keep items easy to access. If you are are taller, you’d probably prefer 5 cubes stacked for storage.

A white cabinet with three drawers, perfect for craft room storage.
A craft room with a blue and white storage unit.

Some items are best organized in open storage that can accommodate frequent changes in the contents. Storage for yarn and planners is the perfect example. Open storage like below allows you to immediately see all the supplies, remove just one or multiple items and can accommodate different sizes or numbers of supplies.

Other craft supplies require options designed specifically for their unique storage needs. Craft paper, particularly 12 x 12 inch paper needs storage that meets unique requirements. You can see below that the black divider in the middle of the cube supports the decorative paper so that it doesn’t warp and also keeps it filed vertically so that it’s easy to flip through, find the exact piece you want and then it’s easy to remove.

I prefer to organize craft and decorative paper vertically to make it easy to quickly flip through and remove the one I want. I never keep full pages of paper stacked horizontally – it’s just too much work to dig through the pile without damaging the paper.

Craft room storage ideas: A crate filled with an ample amount of white yarn.
A white cabinet with a lot of craft room storage ideas papers in it.

Other craft supplies need to be organized in smaller, more specific categories. These drawers make it easy to keep different categories organized and visible. Bonus feature – you can remove the drawer and carry it to your craft work area.

A drawer filled with an abundance of craft supplies, perfect for organizing your craft room storage.

For even more portability, choose a caddy that allows you to carry supplies used in most craft projects to your work space (and easily put them away). You can create multiple basic craft supplies totes for different types of crafting, such as beading, embroidery, paper crafting, painting, etc.

Craft room storage ideas: A blue container with scissors and other supplies in it.

I like to store my craft caddy out of the way but in an easy to reach location. I have found that the top shelf is often the perfect location in my craft room.

UbeCube

UbeCube is a collapsible, omni-stackable uber-modular crate system. They are modular, practical, versatile and easy to use.

The UbeCube system is built around the core cube. These cubes come in 3 colors and and with each passing month, more features and accessories in even more colors are added. Check them out to learn about their features, including omni-stackability, collapsibility, connectability and more.

Use UBECUBE coupon code ORG31 for 10% off your order.


Find all my best organizing tips, hacks, printables and favorite products in the table below. You can scroll though the table and look for ideas or search for specific ideas with the magnifying glass in the upper right-hand corner (on desktop). Click on the topic and then click through the specific article.

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5 Comments

  1. Great idea to gather all of your craft supplies! Most of my supplies are in my closet, but I realized I do have some craft books and other supplies on a bookshelf in my bedroom too. Thanks for the reminder to look everywhere!

  2. I really like the idea of budgeting for organizing supplies! This is timely as I will soon be *getting* a craft room lol so now I can get a jump ahead on organizing, before it gets out of hand. Thank you.

    1. Congrats on your soon-to-be craft room, Tamalita! I know how exciting that is. It took me 30 years and 15 homes before I got my own craft room. Enjoy!!

  3. Craft Room Organization
    You hint is to Sort like and then evaluate.
    Can you give a quick example?
    Do all like thing get broken down to a small list or a broader one?
    Do makers also go with pencils and do pencil crayon go separately from pencils.
    The like things are where I am stuck.
    Yarn knitting Needles and crochet hooks were a breeze but things that might be considered paper and its other tools and things are really tough.
    I use a lot of tags for crafts, do they go with PAPER crafts or by themselves??
    Thanks MO

    1. Generally, you should sort in a way that makes sense to you. But let me explain what makes sense to me and see if that helps. Markers, pencils and crayons go into the large category of writing or coloring tools. Then break them out into pencils, markers, crayons, etc. If you have many markers you can then break them into either brands of markers, types or sizes of markers or colors of markers (whichever makes the most sense to you and what you have). Your goal is break the big group down into small enough groups so you can evaluate how much you have and how much you need of each type of item. With paper, I see it as craft paper being one category that is then broken down into separate sub-categories. I see tags as their own category, especially if you have a lot of them. You would break your large category of tags into smaller categories, such as large, medium and small or general, birthday and Christmas, or by color. Your goal being to evaluate what you have. So, if you find that you have a lot of St. Patrick’s day tags or orange colored tags and you don’t use them, then you can let them go. I hope this helps. And feel free to let me know if you have more questions.

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