The Paper Addict in Me.

 Hi, my name is Bonnie and I am addicted to paper. I have tons of it and I still leave some good paper in the store! One night I was so proud of myself for walking out of Archiver's buying only 3 sheets of paper that I had to brag to my friend in paper Wanda. To my chagrin she laughed at me. "So you realize that that is like an alcoholic saying they just had three drinks." Yup. Paper. I can't live without it.
  So brings the age old question how do I keep it organized? While my system may not look quite as nice as your local scrapbook store, it works for me. As always, the first question I ask myself when organizing my scrap lot is how will I look for this?

Solid color card-stock---My basic solid color card-stock is divided by color. I have found that I really love the Cropper Hopper paper files because they protect my paper, it makes it easy and quick to file, and the plastic paper files are very portable. 
   However, I am truly in love with the Close to My Heart line card-stock, so I do keep that and the Stampin Up cardstock separate from everything else. With one file to every named color, I can quickly grab what I need and it is easier to keep track of what I need to reorder.

   As for the other store-bought variety, I currently have those in the horizontal stacking files simply because it is easy to grab the entire stack of red and find what I need that way, and see if I am getting low on one general color. Eventually I would like to put these in the cropper hopper paper files too, but that can go on my Christmas wish list.

Patterned Paper-- Keeping patterned paper organized is a challenge.

Themed Patterned paper- Although I do not believe they are on the market anymore, I do love my original Cropper Hoppers. I keep my themed stickers, dies and patterned paper in the plastic vertical paper files, and sticker files from cropper hopper and then use the old hanging file type system to separate the themes for easy location.  This works well if I am in a pinch for a quick get away, I can grab the theme files, my photos and off I go.

General patterns- These are the tricky ones. Still using the cropper hopper vertical paper files, I divided the patterns into main color. Then divided the colors into patterns. (ie:stripes, florals, circles and dots, etc....) Now this is where I ask myself, how will I look for this paper? Generally, when I am looking for paper to match my photos, I start with theme, then go to color, and it may not necessarily be one specific color, just a feeling, a mood for the page. Thus I divided the patterns into families. Warm, Cool and Neutral.

 Lately, I have been going through my patterns matching the stripes that go with the florals and such, creating my own kits, making it quicker and simpler to pull paper later. Since paper is generally colored to create a mood, it still files the same way in my system. It also works well with any pattern scraps that are left over larger than 4 x 6 or those single pages we are left with when I bought two and needed only one.

Okay the truth is that I really have too much paper and so to find anything I had to get down to the nitty gritty and divide and conquer. It works for me. Er, at least for now, because as we all know, half the fun of scrapbooking is reorganizing our stash!