Two Ways to Organize with Zip Top Baggies

If you like food and crafts, there’s a chance you have a lot of both in the house. The trick to being able to hoard even more of these wonderful things is to keep them organized.

Today I show you how I keep my paper scraps under wraps with the use of zip top baggies and a pair of sturdy magazine holders. These are not your run of the mill wimpy magazine holders that fall over and get bent out of shape when you add weight to them. I found these at a surplus store, so sadly I’m not sure where to get more.

My system for sorting scraps is simple. Anything larger than half of a letter sized page goes into the Large Paper Scraps bin, and any off cuts smaller than that get sorted into clear plastic baggies and put into the Small Paper Scraps bin.

These baggies happen to be the perfect size to fit into my hefty magazine holders. Note, I have about a dozen more magazine holders that I use to sort full sheets of unused paper, so this system is compatible and works for me. You could also store your sorted baggies of paper into bins of any type or size, whatever suits yours space.

You may notice in the bottom middle of this photo I have a collection of patterned paper in a clear sheet protector. This was my old method of sorting which isn’t as great since you can’t close off the top, but since I’m only storing them vertically on a shelf it works too. The key thing here is visibility, and grouping into categories. I have several categories here: cool colors, warm colors, neutrals, patterned, hearts (left over from a Valentines craft), die cut shapes (these are the leftovers from projects cut on my Silhouette, mostly the negative spaces from cutting out letters), and lastly on the bottom right you may notice left overs from my most recent paper craft project.

So now that you’re done sorting your paper, head over to the kitchen and get the most out of your freezer space! For this clever system, we look to Karen at The Art of Doing Stuff since she has really got it figured out! This woman is quite serious about food, she made her own front yard vegetable garden for crying out loud, so you know she is an expert on the subject of food and not letting it go to waste.

Check out Karen’s tricks for keeping your frozen food segregated and easy to find over on her blog.

Happy bagging!