Make your own inspiration boxes & binders

We love the holidays and we love collecting! Especially love collecting stickers, cards, tags, bags...really anything that catches our eye. Being seasonal designers we are always creating a seasonal collection in a different season. Like designing winter collections in the summer, spring collections in winter etc. We realized we needed systems to organize these items. After a long search we came across these 12 x 12 clear boxes that are used for scrapbook paper.




We categorize them by the holiday and they are stackable. They are clear, so it's easy to see what is inside quickly. Whenever we are in need of inspiration for any holiday we can just pull the box out.



Here is a sample of the halloween/autumn box



Here is one of the holiday boxes.

We also purchase a lot of holiday magazines –we've mentioned this before here. When we get overwhelmed with them or if we feel that they are taking over the studio we cut them up and take the pictures we want and put them in a box.





Then we will go through them and categorize them. We'll lay them out and tape them to a piece of paper and slip them into non glare sheet protectors and then put them into binders. We use these great binders we found by Russell & Hazel. The orange binder is dedicated to colors & pattern, the white binder is for christmas and the green is for all other holidays: valentines, halloween and easter.



This approach makes it so much easier to go through all those articles and pictures you wanted to save. You can use page dividers to separate sections. This will cut down clutter in your work space. This approach has saved us time searching for images and has freed up valuable shelf space. It's always a on going project, but well worth it. So if you have tons of magazine laying around your home why not try and organize them in your very own binder or box.

Here are some pages samples