Hi

Today I want to show you a fabulous idea I got from a fabulous Stampin’ Up! demonstrator in the UK – Sam at pootles.com.uk.   If you haven’t checked out her blog and videos on YouTube you must.  Now.  I insist!  (But please do come back!)

Look at my new (and OK, I admit, extremely anally retentive!) way to store my sponge daubers!

I use these little daubers all the time, but spend ages in my drawer hunting for them, and then cleaning them before I use them to get rid of the last hint of colour from the last time I used them.  No more! Inspired by Sam’s blog post I bought a new set and  I now have a lovely little box with a sponge dauber for every colour I own.

The sponges are stored in one of Stampin’ Up!’s wood mount cases (you can now buy the cases in lots of 4 and they are soooooo handy!)

This is my box on the inside:

Sam at pootles.com.uk has a great video on how to make the inserts for the box.

I ended up changing the dimensions Sam gives for the inserts just ever so slightly for mine.  I used 9 strips of card stock 12.5 cm long and 2 cm wide, notched at 1 inch spaces.  (I know that is a weird switch between metric and imperial, but trust me, it’s easier that way!)   Then I used 4 strips of card stock 17.8cm wide with notches every 1.8 cm.  This gives you 5 rows of 10 spaces each for your sponges.

To make the notches I made 2 cuts with my scissors on either side of my pen mark (perhaps 2mm apart) and just removed the tiny bit of paper in the middle.

One of the things Sam doesn’t show you in her video is how she got the little circles of colour on the colour chart in her box to show which dauber goes where.    Watching the video, she says it was a very messy process to do – and that I can believe!   So before I made my own box I did some thinking about how I could avoid the mess of inking up all the sponge daubers all at the same time.

I decided to make a 2 sided cover for my box.  A front cover where I could control the mess and dab on one colour at a time, and a blank grid to go on the inside where I will let the daubers ‘do their thing’ over time. (I also took the opportunity to re-arrange and re-ink my ink pads as I opened each one – oh, I was in my own little organisational-nerd heaven this afternoon!)

I cut a piece of white card stock 12.5 x 17.8cm and used my ruler to draw a grid the same dimensions as the notches in the card stock.   I used a few mini glue dots on the blank spaces in my ‘cover’ grid to stick it to the plastic on the cover of the box.

Thanks to Sam for a brilliant idea – and I am so chuffed to have all my daubers so neatly arranged 🙂

Thanks for reading

Caro x