Organizing Your Beads!  

by Lisa A. Lawrence

Deb Simpson of Deb's Boutique® discovered some wonderful bead containers on eBay®!  The containers are like Tic Tac® boxes, with flip lids, in various sizes.  She ordered tons of them and urged me to get some too.  I waited until hers arrived to hear if she was happy with them.  She was thrilled!  So I went online and ordered some too!

My personal storage system consisted of dividing my gold and silver findings into separate zipper bags.  Each time I needed something, it was easy to find the the gold or the silver, but it took a few minutes to dig through each bag to find the right item. 

I took four bags of eye pins and consolidated them into the tiniest bead container. 

They fit with room to spare!

Digging around my findings, I came up with a fifth bag! 

It fit too!  No more though.  This one is FULL!

I did the same thing with my Gold Findings and all these packages organized into less than half of this 4" x 6" box!  This is the box of 36 containers which cost $10.50.  Many of the findings fit in the smallest size container which is only about 1"x 1" x 1/2".  The larger ones in the box are 1 1/2" x 1" x 1/2"  The rest of the boxes are filled with sequins!

The rest of my sequins I put in the box of 24 containers, which are 1 7/8" x 1" x 1/2" and cost $7.50 for the set.

This big ring of sequins fit in this little box!  When there were extras, I put them in tiny 2x3 zipper bags, placing those in a larger bag of "overflow" sequins.

I love square sequins but they are difficult to find in small sizes.  Cartwrights Sequins sells 4mm square sequins for 99 cents a bag!  I bought every color they had.  The fit very nicely in this size container.

My beading system was horrendous. My bags and containers of beads were just thrown into a  24" x 18" x 6" plastic storage container. I had a smaller overflow plastic storage container 17" x 11" x 6", shown above, just for my hanks of beads..  If I wanted a certain color of bead, I had to dig through ALL the beads in both containers... and pull out ALL of that color... then narrow it down to the style of bead I wanted.

I took the hanks from the overflow box and put them on my HUGE coffee table!

For the beads, I used a box of 12 containers, which are the largest sized container, each measuring  3 3/4" x 1" x 1/2." 
A GREAT bargain at only $4.50.

Again, if I had overflow, I put these in the tiny zipper bags.
I was so happy with all the containers that I ordered more!

You can find these containers and more at the eBay store Bead Orders, or under the seller name of blueiris.

Everything shown on this page, plus about 25 rings of sequins not shown, fit into these containers.  I ended up using eight 12 container bins, four 24 container bins and one 36 container bin.

I was able to put these containers back into the small plastic storage container with room to spare for three more boxes!  Instead of a large bin and a small bin, I now have everything in the small bin!  I organized it by color and by type (beads, sequins, pearls, and findings!)  This is by no means a quick project.  It probably took me about eight to ten hours to do this and I ended up with beads on my floor, my couch and all three of my pets!

You can order these containers at the Blueiris eBay store