I am excited to announce that I am this week's Crafty Superstar over at Cut Out + Keep! For the next few days I will share here they tutorials I wrote for them. I haven't written a lot of tutorials so I was super excited to take up the challenge. Enjoy!
How the heck do you store your bead making treasures
in a way that's organized, compact, yet allows you to see what you have?
I took a simple spice rack idea, and enlarged it about 1000%! Here is how
I built my bead storage solution - the first ever Beads for Busy Gals tutorial
that appeared in 2010. Let’s start with how it looks when
finished…my “studio” was originally also my home office desk, so I used the
wall over my desk.
Supplies you need are
dependent on the space you have on the wall, so what follows is what I did for
the approximately 8'x8' space I had over my desk. I started
with four 36"x24" pieces of sheet metal, found at the hardware
store in a bin with metal rods and other odd ball stuff (pictured below). This will be the most expensive part of your
project – at my hardware store each piece was about $20.
You will also need sixteen fender washers and lag
bolts. I don't know if these are the exact sizes you need - I just wanted
you to have a picture of what I was talking about. The bolts have to go
through the wall and into the studs, so longer is better.
Now here is the really really important part: figure
out where the studs are in the wall where you are hanging the sheet metal, and
then sketch out how you will orient the pieces of sheet metal and where to
drill the holes, in both the sheet metal and the walls.
Notice in these
pictures how we didn't put the hole all the way in the corner, plus overlapped
the pieces in the middle, to help maximize strength and surface area.
We used two bolts per corner in the center where two
pieces of sheet metal overlapped, and one bolt in each of the "edge"
corners. Now you are done with the hard part!
Magnetic bottom, clear top spice tins are easy to come by,
but it gets expensive if you want hundreds of them. For example, you can
get 3 for $5.99 from the Container
Store. But I knew with a little research there had to be a better
way, or at least someone that sold in bulk. I found a great company that
I highly recommend, Specialty
Bottle. I ordered a hundred each of their 4 oz and 8 oz deep Tin
Containers with Clear Top, and with shipping it worked out to about $1 a
piece. To make the tins magnetic, I bought a roll of stick on magnetic
tape, like this from Amazon.
It sticks pretty well and is easy to cut to shape with scissors.
If you have a sheet metal fabricator in your town, you can
have a piece made that fits your wall exactly, like I did on this wall when I
moved into my new full-time studio. One
lesson learned – make sure you take into account electrical outlets and other
things on the wall. We had a heck of a
time cutting the hole for the outlet! :-)
