Hello! I wanted to share with you a little about my designing, crafting space. I have an oak roll top desk my dear hubby bought for me years ago that was designed to be a computer desk. This desk has evolved over time as I got rid of the dot matrix and moved on to a wireless all in one, and parted with the bulky desk top computer choosing to use a lap top that I could take with me when I needed to.
In the lower left side of the desk was the place where the old dot matrix printer sat. You know those ones with the pin fed paper and you had the paper stack below that fed up through the printer. Well, I had taken the shelf for the printer out long ago and made room for that CPU tower but now that was gone too soooo
When I got my Silhouette Cameo, my dear hubby made a new shelf unit for the drawer that would hold my machine and then I placed a paper holder below it to hold labels, printable business card stock, glossy photo paper, printer paper etc.
What is cool is that my Silhouette has this great home. It is right by my side where I can pull it out when I want to use it. It is easy to feed the mats in right from where I sit and when I'm not using it (which really isn't very often, "he he") I can shut the drawer and it's out of the way.
Recently I was frustrated because I keep several active cutting mats going all the time with varying stages of "stickyness" and they were piled up taking up space on a nearby storage rack and they would stick together and just not look "nice" laying around.
So, back to dear hubby. He helped me build a storage box for my cutting mats. I use Cricut mats in my Silhouette simply because they are less expensive and I believe they last longer. I do have one Silhouette mat that I use to mark off the Cricut mat so that is is the same size and then I cut a little bit off of the top and bottom of the Cricut mat so that it works perfectly with the alignment when cutting.
Overall outside dimensions are 13 7/8" wide by 12" tall by 3 1/2" deep. The front and back are made from 1/4" cabinet plywood and the sides and bottom from 1/2" by 3.5" pine board. The grooves are 1/8" wide and 1/4" deep. I have room to store 6 mats in this box.
Now, this is my designing and crafting space and I want everything to be beautiful and colorful so I painted my box a lovely blue and added a scripture because being a Jesus follower I like to have God's word around me all the time. It turned out so lovely!
The mats slide in so easily, they are just far enough apart to make grasping the one I want very easy to do and now they live in a beautiful place right next to me on my right.
This isn't something everyone needs but it works for me and I thought I would share just in case it was something you might like to use too. Standard 12 x 12 paper holders won't work because the mats are wider, almost 13" wide so I couldn't find anything ready made that would hold them.
I hope you enjoyed seeing a little bit of my space and what I've done and that you are inspired to amp up your space too.
Kate