Free it up Friday!

Today is my first "Free it up Friday" for 2014 and I am excited to share some things with you.

First of all, if you read my blog in 2013, you may remember me talking about our house being on the market. Unfortunately it didn't sell, so we are going to be starting that process again shortly. In the meantime, I am going to be trying to keep up with my blog a little better this year.

For "Free it up Friday" this week, I am going to talk about my excessive collection of Project Life cards, and my decision and process to free up some space in my closet studio so I can actually work in there. At some point last year, I had been reading a thread on a message board about someone who had decided to take all their Project Life cards and sort them by color. I thought the idea of separating my kits was crazy, so I passed the idea over and continued to store all of my core kit boxes in my studio. Fast forward to last weekend...I was setting up my 2014 Project Life album, and my mind revisited the thought of color organized journaling cards. Admittedly I still thought it was crazy, but then I found this You Tube video. She did such a nice job explaining her process and her boxes looked so nice, that I thought I had to at least give it a try.

Working on my 2013 album gave me some more insight into how I scrapbook, and one thing that I tended to do was scrap by color. Therefore, this organization system, by color, seemed like it might make sense. Below I have some images of my process. I still have some of my kits in their boxes, but as I complete the albums that I am using them for, I will be adding the extra cards into my box. In the pictures you will see cards from Honey, Cinnamon, Rain, Midnight, Jade, Blush, and Kraft. Most of these kits were partials that I either split or traded with others.

The supplies I decided to use...We R Memory Keepers tab punch (file tab), Tim Holtz tiny attacher, Project Life totally blank cards in both the 4x6 and 3x4 sizes, Close to my Heart medium container, Project Life core kits, colored paper scraps, and a pen.

My next step was to punch out 2 tabs for each color.

Then I attached one tab to each card, creating a 3x4 and a 4x6 divider for each color.

Here is a quick picture of all the core kits I broke apart for this project.

Sorting the first kit into piles by color. If a card had one color on one side and a different color on the other, I split them in half. My rule of thumb was to decide which color was most prominent on the side of the card (what color I thought I would most likely use it for) for the multicolored cards.

I finished sorting the kits and adding them to the box. In the end, I added a few miscellaneous cards...month cards, days of the week cards, weekly overview cards, seasons, and holidays.

I haven't worked with using the cards much since I reorganized them, but the couple times I have looked for something has proven to me that this reorganization was worth it.