Project Life: My New Storage System for PL, Snap, MAMBI, and Other Scrapbooking Cards

Raise your hand if you’ve been collecting Project Life cards like they’re going out of style! MEEEEEE!!! ME ME ME!!!

I just jumped on the Project Life bandwagon this year. And the Sn@p! card bandwagon. And the MAMBI card bandwagon. And the free printables bandwagon.

Wow. That’s a lotta’ bandwagons! Must be why I have so many dang cards.

Here are the Project Life kits I have (so far, wink):

Blush
Honey {See why it’s my favorite Project Life kit HERE!}
Jade
Midnight
Slate
Wedding
Baby
Wellington
5th and Frolic

What I’ve been doing is buying partial kits, trading cards, and selling cards. I think the only kit I still have all the cards for is Baby and that’s because I’m going to use it for multiple baby books. Oh, and I have all of Wellington and Wedding but those are mini kits.

The large and small boxes that Project Life come in are very nice but they’re not a very efficient use of space, especially when you only own 1/4 or 1/3 of the larger kits. So I decided to throw away all the PL boxes and come up with a new storage system.

Requirements:

1. Easily accessible
Opening one lid is fine but I don’t wanna’ be opening cases inside of cases and I need to be able to flip through the cards.

2. Something I can label
I need to SEE the names not just SEE the cards. I’m weird like that.

3. Something I can keep on my desk
Another thing I didn’t like about keeping the cards in the original PL box was that they were too big to keep on my desk, so I had to go over to the bookshelf to get them every time I worked on my Project Life or a PL-type album.

One idea I’d thought about replicating was from LAYLE KONCAR at SIMPLE STORIES. She used one of those old cassette holders (in case you are disgustingly young, cassettes were music-playing things before iPods came along). She tilted it up and it’s genius how you can see all your cards so well with this system.

Alas, it didn’t meet requirements 2. and 3. above :(

I got this wild hair late Friday night so no time to go shopping for a storage system. I perused my stash and decided to use some plastic shoe boxes I got from Target awhile back. They were holding handmade cards I’ve received over the years and various mini albums, mostly made at CKU and such. So those things were dumped out and I need to find a new home for them now. Which is a pain.

But totally worth it because look how great my new Project Life card storage came out! All my PL cards are in there except Wellington which is on my desk as I’m currently working with it.

As you can see, the box on the left is for Project Life cards and on the right is for Sn@p!, MAMBI, free printables, and misc. cards like those calendar cards from ELLE’S STUDIO. I used lined Project Life 4×6 blank cards to create the dividers, along with washi tapes and my Brother label maker. No, I’m not super creative but it got the job done.

I’m so happy that all my Project Life, Sn@p!, MAMBI (can you say “Addicted!”???), and free printable cards are all in one place! Well, two places but you know what I mean. They sit to the right of my chair at my L-shaped desk. A divided tray with all my other Project Life-y type stuff sits to the left – washi, 6×6 pads, WRMK small pads, corner rounder, arrow punch, date stamps, ink, stickers, etc.

It gets very dusty in my scraproom so I love that this is covered storage. When I’m actively using them, I can slip the shoebox lids right underneath the boxes so they don’t take up extra room or flop backward covering other things like the PL boxes do. And when I’m not using them, they seal on the boxes tightly and keep the dust out.

Plus I {heart} hearts SO much! They just make me happy and I’m glad they’re now sitting so close to me at my desk instead of way across the room on that ol’ bookshelf like before. Now we can get to know each other better, maybe go out for a drink, play Scrabble, you know, that kind of thing.

So there’s my latest version of scrapbook storage for all those Project Life-type cards. What do you think? How are yours stored? I would love to hear!