When Ginny turned twelve, she began to sort through the accumulation of childhood and toss. Beads, barrettes, buttons, feathers, "jewels", shells, bits of ribbon and string, little flowers and lots of miniature items once deemed suitable for beanie baby tea parties. Both the sentimentalist and the recycler in me were horrified (and somewhat envious of her ability to simply let go). Much of it did make it into the trash, but I intercepted a number of things and then of course I had to answer the question, "Now what?!"
Any storage system is only as good as your ability to retrieve an item when you need it! I followed four guidelines:
1. I would use storage containers I already had.
2. With so many tiny things, I needed to be able to see them.
3. I decided to sort by color as the most likely way to find what I would need in future.
4. I must be able to easily add new items to the collection so that I could remain organized!
These canning jars have worked beautifully for me, pints in the front row, quarts in the back. In the end I eliminated the lids I had originally envisioned using, to remove one more step to getting at/putting away the collection. I can easily see if I'm running low on a color or need to stop collecting a particular color for awhile.
Hope this sparks an idea for conquering some of your storage/retrieval challenges. -Kathy
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