More Organizing Notebooks

Some time ago I shared about my stamping notebook.  In it, I stamped all my stamps that had words or phrases on them - organizing them into categories.  After seeing how much help that notebook was, I decided to take the idea a bit farther.

First, I made another stamping notebook  - this one for picture stamps organized by category.  The page you see above is one of my "flower" pages.  This notebook is SOOOO helpful - especially when I'm wanting a particular type of element for a card.  Perhaps the card is going to someone who likes cats - so I look at my "cats" page.  Or maybe the person loves roses so I look through my "flowers".  While it took some time, I now have a system.  Any new stamps I get are immediately stamped into my notebooks before I do anything else with them.  (This also allows me to double check that they are all in good shape.  It doesn't happen often, but I've gotten a couple of stamp sets where the stamps were made or cut out wrong so when I stamped parts were missing.  It's much easier to get replacements if you know this right away!)

My next notebook was of all about dry embossing:

I ran my embossing folders through with plain white paper and then used an ink dauber to rub over the top to make the design stand out.  I then added the pieces to my notebook.  After doing the embossing folders, I did all my stencils in a similar way - embossing them in my embossing machine & using ink to make the design stand out.

My last notebook is all about cutting dies:

Usually the packaging the dies come in has some sort of picture on it.  I just take these parts of the packaging and put them in my notebook in the correct category (this picture is the tags and labels section).  While this notebook can allow me to leaf through and choose a die for a particular purpose, it also makes it much easier when I'm writing about a card I made and didn't get the description written right away.  It allows me to quickly and easily know which dies I used so I can put that in my write up.