Do You Organize by Color, Size or Shape?

Is this the age-old question of every beader or what? I'm a sucker for carrying cases, storage containers and all those cute little tiny vials for organizing my beads. I even have to confess my many purchases of Talenti® gelato just for the containers (haha! For those of you who have not tried it, DON'T! Very addictively delish).

Tammy Honaman has a great article on how to Organize Your Seed Beads which tend to be the most challenging type of bead to organize, as well as gives us an inside look into how she reorganized her studio and beads in the "Big Cleanup." But there are so many other types of beads and mixed media items to be organized and stored in my studio since I’m a "mixed-media" artist (that label justifies keeping everything) I seem to need to go even further!

I'm a huge fan of everything by Plano® Creative Options™. I don't know if it's their cute factor or total functionality that first got me, but I'm hooked. I love to use the bead tower for traveling, trade shows, teaching and demos.

Size

I have my pearls organized by size. Strands and loose kept together in separate sections by each common size. Pearls have been the most challenging for me as they come in so many shapes and sizes from stick pearls to rice pearls. Their shapes are so vastly different it's good to use this type of organizer box for the bulkier items.

Color

I have friends who organize their entire bead collection by color, like Tammy did. The size of their stash is usually quite manageable and they design in colorways as opposed to material types or shapes. They use the top zip bags for each bead type and then put them all in drawers separated by color. I think they must have really good memories for this method!

Color AND Size

I've watched so many organizing shows (and all time fave Hoarders), and one lesson I've learned (I said LEARNED which doesn’t mean I've done it yet) is to have "zones" for each type of storage. So one section of my studio is all seed beads, another huge rolling cart is filled with containers full of crystal components sorted by colors and sizes. This works great when you first start organizing but can get trickier when you keep adding to your stash, and let's be honest here, who doesn't do that? So I try to plan for expansion and order a couple extras, this saves money on shipping and you know you'll need it down the road anyway!

It seems as though no matter how many little containers I own, I find myself still searching for that Holy Grail of perfect organizational solutions. As I continue to find solutions for my stash, I’ll share. What have you tried? What do you prefer?