Craft Cave Upgrades

 Ok!  In my Christmas card post I alluded to some upgrades in the craft Cave.  Here we go! 

Brother Scan and Cut DX - ($199.00 on sale) this is the only thing on the market with a built-in scanner.  Every other cutting machine on the market requires you to scan your sheet of stamped images, open them on your computer and finally import them into the software your cutting machine uses.  Saying this next bit loud for the people in the back, SCREW THAT!  The creative process is a fluid thing.  Stopping to mess with scanners, computers and absolute CRAP software like Design Space - yes, Cricut, I'm talking directly to you, is a creativity KILLER.  Brother fixes all that by allowing me to stamp my sheet full of whatever I want, scan it into their machine, set an offset if I want one, and cut.  Boom.  Is it perfect?  No, there is a learning curve, but it's not too steep.  At least not for the model I bought.  Get one of these if you are doing a lot of fussy cutting around your stamped images.  Get one of these if you're spending tons of cash on dies that match or outline your stamps.  This will pay for itself inside of year if that's what you spend your dollars on. 

Baker's Rack with sheet pans ($125.00 for the rack, $35 for sheet pans) - I have more holiday and Halloween stamps and dies than I do any other kind of stamp out there.  So much so, that my old storage was bursting at the seams.  Drawers were getting stuck; they were so overstuffed.  Things would fly out the back after forcing the drawers to open.  It was nuts.  I needed a way to pull out stamps and dies by theme so I could see them all and 'shop' for the one I wanted.  Enter the commercial baker's rack.  Christmas (and more) got moved to sheet pans, Halloween got moved to where Christmas used to be and then everything else just opened up!  This thing has smooth running wheels, making it very easy to maneuver.  

New labels created for all the drawers, because I'm old now and I can't read those tiny things they give you on the front of the drawer for labels anymore.  I hand wrote them using colors that I can see. 

Swapped locations - The standing workstation (die cutting) got swapped with the trimming workstation for straight cuts.  I took all the Sizzix dies and incorporated them into the themed drawers or sheet pans with likeminded stamps.  This allowed me to remove one whole bookcase making room for the swap of the workstations.  That bookcase went into the back of the closet for odd storage of unused items that I still want to keep.  You can see the bookcase behind the baker's rack just hanging out there out of the way. 

To make room for the baker's rack, all the rolling carts came out of the closet and under the standing workstation.  I had to demo out some hooks that were on the back wall of the closet, but no biggie.  

Get Rid of Cardboard Boxes for Storage ($90.00) - look, I know its cheap and easy to get, but this is supposed to be your happy place.  If it was in cardboard, it's been re-homed into something pretty or practical, designed to hold my stuff.

Upgraded Chair Wheels to Rollerblade Style - ($23.00) - absolute game changer.  Silent running for late night crafting, easy to glide over to the drawer holding the stuff you need.  Love them.  Get some.

Raise the surface of the cutting station - see the pink squares just under the board at the top?  Those are scraps of 4x4 posts I dug out of the garage.  Again, I am tall, to the extra height is lovely for me.  And, I get a little extra space to stash paper under the board. 

Landing Pad - if you go the baker's rack route - you are going to need a place to land those sheets when you pull them out.  Think about that ahead of time.  You don't have to get a full-sized rack either.  I'm tall, so full sized is easy for me.  If you are short, get a half-sized rack.  But, back to the landing pad; I have a table that works perfectly.  I also have lots of felt scraps that will be sewn together and stuck to the tabletop with sookwang. (I will blog about sookwang soon).  I can now land the sheet pans without making a ton of noise or scratching the table, or the pan for that matter.  If you go with a half-rack, you may not even need a landing pad.  It will depend on how much stuff you put in it.  Mine are super full which equals heavy.  

Here you see my felt scraps - some are brown so they don't show up so well.  My sewing machine can handle the heavy duty felt with no trouble.  Found that out with last year's cookie book.  So once sewn, trimmed to fit nicely, and stuck down to the table it will be a soft landing for the sheet pans.