How to Organize your Jewelry Making Supplies

This is a question that comes up at least once a month in the jewelry making forums. Everyone has a bit of a different way it works for them. Somethings seem pretty universal after trial and error most people end up doing a few things the same. At the end of this article is a video.

This is my work bench. It is an old desk I didn't feel bad about hammering on. I made sure it was very sturdy since I didn't want any bounce back when I hammered. It is a heavy wooden desk with nice big drawers.

I keep more fragile cabochons, briolettes and focals in these cases and I have plastic boxes for ther beads.

Lighting is important. I have two lights and then an over head on the ceiling. As I get older I think I might need a flood light too! The two lamps have daylight bulbs so I can see the colors I am working with as true as possible. (You can see the lights in the video). I didn't even clean up before I started this article. I thought about it but then changed my mind. This is how it looks all of the time. It may be creatively messy but it is organized. Well okay sometimes it looks even a bit more chaotic.

Beside my desk and my chair I have a book shelf. On the end I have hung nails and on each hook I hang all the gemstones of a certain color together. When I use some beads on a strand I just knot the strand again with the left over gemstones and hang it back on it's hook. I like this set up since then I can take the bead or pendant I am trying to match up and I can just run it past all the colors to see what works.

 

On the upper right corner of my desk (in the video) you can see my two tins where I store my silver and copper scraps. I always plan to someday use them but the pile just seems to keep growing.

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Behind the wire jumble is a big wooden bowl where all my bead soup beads go. It was full. I just emptied 5 years worth of beads into a bag and gave them to my sister. The same shelf on my work bench holds the jewelry I recently made so I can look at it over a few days and see if I want to keep it as is or change anything. Eventually it goes into cases.

  

As you can see there are even more hanks of colors here.

 

Out of that mess sometimes comes beauty. That is the most amazing thing I think. Be sure to watch the video to see the rest of the work space.

Szarka
... to see Szarka's Jewelry

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