MFT Design Team Creative Chat

MFT has come up with a new monthly feature and we think it's something you'll really enjoy. The My Favorite Things Design Team Creative Chat is a new monthly feature, where we are challenged to explore our creative spaces and share valuable organizational methods, tools, and shopping strategies with you. You'll be able to peek into our creative spaces, ask questions, and share your own ideas in the MFT forum.  This month, we were asked the following questions:  

How do you store and organize your Die-namics?  

Any fun or helpful Die-namics purchasing strategies you'd like to share?  

How do you store extra Die-namics die-cuts? 

Visit Kim's Blog for a full list of designers that have taken up the challenge and get ready to delve into the minds of our creative team!

I have to say I LOVE my Die-namics storage "system". I'm fortunate to have a spare bedroom as my stamp room, or as I refer to it, my Girl Cave ;-) Also, fortunately, I have a double closet in that room with two bi-fold doors. I've attached adhesive backed magnetic sheets to the doors, which provides me with LOTS of area on which to attach my Die-namics dies. I'm taking advantage of unused space and they're all out there where I can see them and are easily accessed. This was important to me when deciding how to store my dies--they had to be easy to get to, preferable all within sight, and I didn't want to be flipping through albums or such. Using the otherwise wasted space was a bonus :) Here's the overall view. As you can see, I can get a ton of them in this space. The whited out space? September's dies--you'll be seeing them soon!

I didn't want to mar the paint on the doors, and I didn't want to install these in a more permanent manner, so I attached 1/4" foam core (I used THIS type presentation board, which is very light weight) to the door with 3M Command poster strips, then adhered the magnetic sheets to the foam core. I can easily remove the panels without harming the paint.

Here, you can see where I label my dies. I organize my dies according to release date. At first, I was just writing the month and year they were released on the backs of the dies. As my collection grew, that wasn't doing the job so I started using a removable label with all of the dies for each month to keep them more organized. For example, all of the dies released in January 2011, are grouped right beside and below that label. I pretty much know where each die is on the magnet sheet, and everything is visible, so finding a die is really fast.

I also label each die with the name since I place them on the magnetic sheet cut-edge down.

I do that so they're easier to remove--I can just hook a finger nail on the edge and they come right off. Easy peasy! If I attach them smooth side down, they are a bit more difficult to remove.

OK, so that's how I store my Die-namics. I don't really have purchasing strategies except you need them all, LOL! As far as storing extra die-cuts, I don't have a lot, but what I do get stored with my paper scraps, by color.

That's it for me today and thanks SO much for stopping by! I hope I've given you some ideas for storing your own Die-namics.