I admit it, I love art supplies.
I think it’s true that there are two different hobbies, creating art and buying art supplies haha.
About a year ago I started buying stencils and now I have a lot of stencils…but I was barely using them because I could never find the ones I was looking for and it was just too much of a pain to look through them all.
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Since I have been getting more into art journaling and mixed media, I wanted to find a way to store my stencils. I tried a bunch of things and watched a bunch of YouTubes, but nothing really worked for me. I had them in folders and I had them standing up in a bin.
But they would stick together.
Then I put papers between them, but they were harder to find.
I wanted to find an easy solution that was not going to take hours to set up.
Suddenly it occurred to me that I could use the art portfolio that I purchased to store my loose artwork!
I created a video to show you how this works with all of my stencils:
Why This Works for Storing My Stencils
This portfolio is the size of my largest stencils (9X12 inches) and has 48 pages. that means I can store a lot of stencils in one book. It doesn’t take up much space in my art room and is super convenient.
I can see all of my stencils just by flipping through the pages. This is great because previously I didn’t even know which stencils I had because they were all in a pile.
Negatives
It isn’t a perfect system.
Many of my stencils are smaller than 9X12, so I put several on one page. I like that because I can see a bunch at once, but they do move around when turning the page so sometimes I have to move them back to see the full stencil. It is still better than the pile though!
The other thing I’ll warn you about is that the stencil organizing portfolio I am using isn’t made with tough materials. The plastic is pretty thin and might rip over time. I can already see that it gets little bends in it from being handled.
To me it is worth it. Even if the plastic ripped and I had to tape it to keep it together, I still love having access to my stencils so would just use some cute washi tape and move on.
How do you store your stencils? Do you have any ideas to share?