Desperation Leads to Results

A wonderful addition

I have been desperate for a better way to organize my soap recipes as well as other things in my creative area.  To start with since I have samples of my various soaps I needed a practical way to store them.  Since they are small and numerous I also needed a cheap option.  Thank you Lord for clearance buys.  I found pencil boxes for $0.33 each on clearance.  I don't even know off hand how many I got ( a lot! ).  They are wonderful for storing all of those little sample slices, as well as my shaving soaps.  This allows me to store each scent separately so that the scents do not combine.

$5 yard sale find - Thank you Mama!!!!

I started dressing up the bookshelf by giving it a good sanding.  After I sanded the bookshelf, I wiped everything down so that there was no paint dust to mess up the new paint.  I used the paint from the table to give the bookshelf two coats of paint for good coverage of the rough spots.  Now it looks all "spiffy" to quote a friend of mine.  It's amazing how much of a difference a coat of paint makes.

Another area that I was getting a bit desperate in was storing my recipes.  I started out keeping them in folders divided into categories.  This arrangement worked just fine for a while, but it got rather cumbersome pretty quickly.

My less than stellar original storage for recipes

After carrying around the file folders and dropping them once or twice it became pretty clear that I needed to find another way to keep all of my recipes organized.  The idea of using a three ring binder was a pretty easy solution.

As you can see I have a lot of papers to deal with

I started by sorting all of my recipes and my sketches out.  This was not any easy thing, but definitely doable.  I had stacks all over the place before I was done.  It doesn't help that I have multiple sizes for most of my recipes.  This allows me greater flexibility in my soap making, but keeping up with the papers is complicated.

After dividing up the recipes into sections, I started putting recipes into page protectors.  I put all of the recipes for each soap into the same page protectors.  This way when I need a recipe I can go to the soap and pull out the right size recipe.  The new arrangement is definitely saving me a fair amount of time.  It is much easier to find what I am looking for.

New solution

All in all, these changes have definitely helped me to stay more organized.  As much soap as I am making, being organized is a necessity.  Since I have sketches for most of my soaps I put the sketches in the front and the recipes behind.  This also makes it a little faster to flip through the binder and find the desired soap recipe.

All together 

I am linking with the following blogs:
http://back2basichealth.blogspot.com
http://www.create-with-joy.com
http://teachingwhatisgood.com/
http://cupcake-n-bake.blogspot.com
http://alifeinbalance.net
http://thediydreamer.com
http://www.the-chicken-chick.com
http://lavendergardencottage.blogspot.com
http://www.flusterbuster.com
http://www.time-warp-wife.blogspot.com
http://www.bystephanielynn.com
http://blackfoxhomestead.com/
http://www.iamannekehn.blogspot.com