The Best Napkin & Ephemera Storage Solution – (Junk journal hack)

I have found, what I believe is THE BEST storage solution for all the ephemera, napkins and scraps of paper that most of us that do paper crafts have a small mountain of!… And it doesn’t cost a small fortune!

Craft Room Organization

I am so excited to be able to share this idea with all my lovely fellow crafters, because I hope it will not only organise your craft stash, but will also make it easy to find things at a glance.

The best way to store napkins and ephemera is in grip seal bags, with a binder clip and wire hook attached and then looped over a pole attached beneath a shelf. It keeps all the embellishments together and makes it easy to see everything at a glance.

I can honestly say that this storage solution has changed my craft room and the way I craft more than anything else in my craft space! And I’m going to show you exactly how I do it and how it works for me.

Junk Journal Ephemera Storage

I make lot of junk journals, and that means I have a lot of scraps of card and paper, as well as all the tags, pockets embellishments, pages to make journals… Well, you get the picture. 😃

If you make junk journals or anything similar, then I’m sure you are in the same boat as me! I have a huge list of junk journal theme ideas with prompts you might enjoy HERE

It is very easy for it to all get out of hand and before you know it, any space that we had for actually crafting on is getting smaller and smaller as all that stash gets bigger!

What made it even worse, was that I was spending so much time looking for things that it cut down on my crafting time and was very frustrating!

Since I have been using this system, I’ve found things I’d forgotten I had, and now I can see everything easily, but it still looks neat and tidy.

The Best Way To Store Napkins For Crafts

I decided I needed to come up with a storage solution for my napkins first, because they really were getting out of hand!

Like a lot of us, I do love my napkins and use them for all sorts of crafts, so I just can’t resist buying them when I see another pretty one (or few 😃 ).

I had them all loose in clear plastic drawers, which worked ok to start with, but as my stash of napkins grew, I knew I needed a better idea because they were getting damaged as I rummaged through them.

The first thing I did was to buy some 7.5 x 7.5 inch plastic grip seal bags from Amazon, and I put 2 napkins back to back in each one.

I thought that was it, all sorted! They were safe in their little bags and no longer got creased or torn as I flipped through them, and it had the added bonus of keeping the bits together when I had used a part of one.

However, I soon realised that it made them very slippery, and they would often end up sliding onto the floor as I looked through them.

I already had some binder clips like these on Amazon so decided to use those to hang them up… That’s when the idea came to me of how it was all going to work.

Using A Rail To Store Napkins & Ephemera

I already knew I was going to be putting some shelves up in my craft room, because I wanted to use the shelves that we had taken out of the old pantry in our house when we renovated it.

So we added the rails to the underside of the shelves, making sure they were far enough forward so the bags didn’t just sit flat against the wall.

We also made sure that there was room between the shelves for the rail + the bags of ephemera + for whatever I wanted sitting on the shelves.

What Hooks To Use To Hang The Bags Of Ephemera?

I had the shelves, rails, bags and binder clips sorted, now I needed some sort of hook to go over the rails!

I knew I was going to need a heck of a lot of them, and everything I looked at was going to work out very expensive in that volume, or just wouldn’t have worked.

At first I tried some large paper clips by bending them into shape, but the wire just wouldn’t bend the way I wanted it to.

So I bought some of this wire from Amazon, it’s garden wire and is 1.2mm (18 gauge) in diameter, it worked perfectly!

The image above shows how I bent it into shape, but the video below shows exactly how I did it and how the storage system is set up.

How To Categorise Craft Ephemera

To be able to keep track of all the ephemera I have, I use different color binder clips

• Napkins = White
• Everything I get from Creative Fabrica = Green
• All physical bought craft items = Blue
• My own creations (including things I’ve made or my own digitals that I’ve printed) = Pink

I might take this a step further in the future and add more binder clip colors, and put things like butterflies, flowers, people etc in sections together.

What Other Things Can Be Stored This Way?

Just about any type of paper craft can use this storage system, here’s a few that I will be using it for…

• Paper napkins
• Ephemera
• Sewing patterns
• Crochet/knitting patterns
• Embellishments
• Paper scraps
• Die cuts & Dies
• Embossing folders
• Stamps
• Paper quilling strips
• Stickers /sticker sheets

Click on the video below to see how I use this craft storage system and for lots of tips and tricks to use with it.

If you prefer, you can watch it over on YouTube HERE

Where To Find Free Printables

In the video (above) I show you some of the digital printables that I have made available for you to download and use for free, you can find them in the Freebies Library here, or click the link in the menu at the top of this page.