Organizational {Friday} Charms & other Small Things!

Okay, so I am totally getting into using charms on my creations! I never saw the need for them until I started seeing my design buddies at Our Daily Bread Designs using them. Then one of the DT members (America) sent all of the ODBD team members an envelope full of amazing charms, and that did it! I became an addict! LOL! America likes to buy her charms from these eBay sellers: mybead88, gem_bead_inc, toppingcrafts. I found a great supplier here in the U.S. and just received a nice order from them (A Charming Place). Not only were the charms all on sale, I also had a 30% off coupon. Then if you buy 10 or more of the same charm, you get approximately 29%-30% off too! So, that is a great way to build your charm collection very inexpensively! Anyway, I didn't mean for this to turn into a "sales pitch." LOL! I know some of you will want to know where I buy them so there ya go! :) Now onto organizing my charms!

At first, I had my charms in a baby food jars because I didn't have very many. I found there were just a few charms in these "huge" jars. They were taking up too much space and they weren't categorized at all! See what I mean? Now if you have a huge collection of charms, baby food jars would work perfectly! I then remembered these perfect "tic tac" boxes I purchased from Whim Beads years and years ago that I used to keep my eyelets in. They work perfectly! I then keep these in a drawer in my antique spice unit my parents got for me. I will be able to keep 34 of these boxes in a drawer! That is a lot of charms! When I had the baby food jars in this drawer, I could only fit 3 jars and my charms were all mixed together.
I used my labeler to label the top of each box. I could cover up the "flip top" if the charm name is long since the charms are too big to come out of the flip top anyway. I take the entire top off to put the charms in each box and remove them. So far my charm categories are:

*Angel
*Bible
*Birdhouse
*Birds
*Butterflies
*Church
*Clock
*Cross, lrg.
*Cross, sm.
*Flower, lrg.
*Flower, sm.
*Hearts, lrg.
*Hearts, sm.
*Leaves
*Music, misc.
*Nautical
*Scissors
*Sewing Machine
*Shells
*Telephone
*Thread
*Treble Clef
*Trees
*Words

If I want to take the charms with me somewhere, these boxes fit in an acrylic box. The acrylic box will hold 24 of the 1 7/8" tubes making this very portable. Such a great piece to take to a crop! You could have your acrylic box filled with a mix of charms, eyelets, brads, grommets, Flower Soft, glitter, beads, etc. Imagine anything tiny going into these boxes! Here is my acrylic box that contains my eyelets in different sized boxes. See how portable this is!
You really can keep anything small in these boxes. They are also very inexpensive. You can buy just the boxes or the small boxes along with the acrylic box. You can see them all here. Also, I do have a coupon code to A Charming Place if anyone is interested. They told me I could share it, so here it is: NEWCUST. You will get 25% off your next order of $10.00 or more. How cool is that?

Well, I hope today's post has been helpful! Enjoy, and have a blessed weekend!