Using Your PC To Cut The Clutter

Stacks of class hand-outs. Hoards of magazines. Pile after pile of print-outs from the web. Your crafting room has quickly become overrun with resources. So many, in fact, that the jillions of great ideas contained in that room are completely useless. Who has time to sort through piles to find that one tip or one layout you vaguely remember?

Organizing isn't only important when it comes to your supplies or your photos; having a system for finding ideas can also improve your paper-crafting. And your computer can be a big help.

Much like we use our computers for storing and organizing our photos, our ideas can also be stored in files on our computers, cutting down on clutter as well as valuable time spent searching. Here's how to go about it:

The two resources that will be most useful to you for creating your own organizational system are your word processing program and flatbed scanner—both of which you may already use frequently.

Before you start, you should come up with a plan for how you want to organize, as this is different for everyone. I recommend creating one main folder for tips and techniques and another for layouts. Within these folders, you can create more specified folders or documents. In the layout folder, for example, you may want folders for themes like "holidays", "birthdays", "heritage", "vacation", "masculine", etc.

Within the "Tips and Techniques" folder, you'll create a variety of word processing documents, each specific to a type of idea. For example, you may end up with files labeled "Border Ideas", "Tag Ideas", "Photo Taking Tips", "Organization Tips", etc. (As you continue to do this, the number of documents and types of tips will grow!)

When you're reading magazines, jot down the tips you want to save on a notepad, then sit down at your computer and type them in, rather than marking them and saving the entire magazine. If it's an entire article and you do want to save the magazine, you can always note in your word document where the tip came from, listing the name, issue and page number of the magazine. If you decide to scan the pages to save the article, be careful of copyright laws—in particular, don't post the article on the web (this is a form of distribution to the public), or make copies and distribute it to a group.

As you acquire tips within a document, create a bulleted list and use subcategories or short headers like "Gluing Vellum", so they'll be even easier to find! Likewise, as you surf the web and get ideas from your bulletin boards, web sites and from friends via email, you can simply highlight them, then copy and paste them into the appropriate document.

As far as saving layout ideas goes, it's just as simple. If you're on the web and you find a layout you'd like to save, simply place your mouse over the image and right-click, then select "download image to disk" or "save image as", and select where you'd like to save it to. Place the image in the appropriate folder. If you've found layout ideas in your magazines that you'd like to hold on to, simply scan the page and crop to save the image. You'll want to be sure that you save the file small enough so you don't take up a ton of space, but large enough that you'll be able to see the details. You can even save the images with names like "birthday tag" or "heart border" to jog your memory and help you find them easier. When you're looking for the layout idea later, simply open up the appropriate folder and view the thumbnails to find the one you want. If you're short on space on your computer, remember that you can always save the files to a disk or CD as well. Another great part of organizing is that if you're headed to a crop and you know you want to do a masculine page, you can simply sit down at your computer, print out the ideas you have and take them with you!

See how technology can be useful in so many ways? Using your computer to organize is a great way to save time, prevent frustration and cut down on the clutter!