Craft Notebooks

Quite a few people have asked about my craft notebooks over the last few weeks, and so I wanted to take a moment to give you a rundown of what I do and how I keep it all together.

The craft binders are kept here:

This area of the homeschool room is my shelf and mine alone. It is filled with binders of things I love. First, I have a binder (the huge 3" baby) for gardening. This binder is filled with calendars of times to plant, pages from magazines with good gardening ideas, seed catalogs, and drawings I make of garden plans of my own. I pull it out in Jan every year and start planning my harvest.

But wait, I am getting ahead of myself. Something ALL of these binders have in common is an obscene amount of page protectors. I buy them by the case and have one covering each and every page in my notebooks. I WANT to be able to use these like cook books. I want to have them out with my morning coffee, or my afternoon tea and not worry about ruining the pages. Everything (even my drawings) goes into a page protector. Yes, I pull the pages out and draw/write/add to them... but they still go back into the page protectors when I am done.

(a page from my decor notebook, which I will get to another day, but illustrates the 'write on it, add stuff to it' thing quite well.)

Another thing that I should say before going further is I try to give credit where ever I can. If I find something I love from another's site, I always put the name in the upper left corner of the page, so I know where to find the post/writer again if I should ever do the craft and want to post their glory.

My notebooks:

Household Notebook

Homeschooling Prep

Food Preservation

Gardening

All Season Crafts

Decor

Fall

Winter

Late Winter (ie: Not Christmas)

Spring

Summer

(I have moved Food Preservation out of my household notebook because the recipes section was getting too big.)

I have several books that don't fit into my seasonal craft notebooks. "All Season Crafts" has their own book and may be filled with felt food tutorials, 'how to make a fairy garden' pages, bird feeders, and other things that you can do all year round.

In my Late Winter notebook, I have a calendar that has the dates of festivals and holidays, a few good quotes for the season, and then it goes into the crafts:

All of the crafts have been given a title that includes where I got them, and each one has been put in to a double column format so I can save paper (and ink) by having smaller pictures, and smaller type font.

During the season, I pull them out and go through and decide what I want to prepare for to do with (or without) the kids. If I do things, and have alterations that I make, I write right on the page. If I have variation that I love and want to do again, I take a picture and add it next to the craft in my notebook. If I do a craft, and don't like it, I recycle the page, or give it to Logan to color on while I am working.

It comes easily to me, but writing it out I can see just how complicated this process is. I hope I have made it a little clearer how I keep everything crafty at my fingertips. :)