Weekend Project - Dauber Organization

Do  you have pet peeves in your craft room? I do! I have a few areas in my craft room that just don't work well, but a solution either doesn't seem obvious or I can't find the 'perfect' container or I think it's going to take too much time.

This weekend I finally organized my daubers.

I have kept them for years in the appropriate 'dauber' storage which works well - don't get me wrong. But I wanted them in my acrylic drawers next to my inks and within reach. As you can see, the storage containers don't fit that well in the drawer.  One doesn't fill the drawer, but I can't fit two in. And there's only 40 places for the daubers (and I have 58 CP inks!). So I would keep the extra daubers around the container and I could never find the ones I was looking for.

Last night, as I watched some tv, I cut about a million (96, actually) strips of white cardstock that were 3.5 inches by .75 inches. I scored each one at .75, 1.5, 2.25 and 3 (you need a square that is .75 inches for the dauber to fit into). Then I had a half inch flap that I put glue on, and I overlapped one of the other flaps, to create little squares like this:

Then I glued them together in rows of 8, using tape runner:

Then I glued the rows together with liquid glue, and I used tiny binder clips as clamps while the glue set:

I kept working until I had them all together, moving the clips from the dry areas to the new, wet areas (who knew I had so many binder clips?!). When I had my 8x12 grid, I cut strips of .75 inch cardstock to create the outside edges. I adhered these with strong double-sided tape:

I cut a piece of white cardstock for the bottom of the drawer and then set the grid in, along with all my daubers. They are in the same order as my ink pads so they will be much easier to find now!

I love this custom solution that fits perfectly in the drawer. In total I would say I spent about 3 episodes of "Parenthood" doing this.

And here they are in their drawer above my CP Minis: