A desperate plea for organization ideas!

Okay, it's not really desperate but it is a plea. I need ideas for how to organize some things.

I think I have a handle on the stationery, envelopes, stickers, stamps, and such but it's the pens, cartridges, pencils, markers and massive amounts of paper that are making me nuts. The paper is the worst. You know, the pages torn from magazines because of the I might use this mentality, the scraps left from making an envelope or label, those little bits I don't seem to be able to throw away because they might come in handy soon.

Right now a good deal of it is sitting in a large box top on my pub table and the rest is in stacks around the living room but it's becoming an unsightly mess and I fear that if anyone sees it, they'll try to get me on Hoarders! I detest clutter and my little haven doesn't have much but if this continues, clutter will become a serious issue. I find myself trying to straighten it but as Flylady says, you can't clean clutter. I might not agree with everything Marla says but she's got that right!

I didn't think all of this was much of a problem until last night when I moved some papers and found a stack of letters and postcards I'd recently received! The letters were opened but I hadn't logged them and they got buried and forgotten. Gasp!

I don't have space for a shelf or cabinet of any sort. My apartment is less than 580 square feet so keep that in mind. I've considered giving away the love seat that gets used once or twice a year but haven't done that yet. If I do, that will free up space. In the meantime, I have to come up with solutions and I can't afford to spend much money on this problem. I'm thinking if I get some boxes from work, load them with stuff as neatly categorized as possible, and label them that might be sufficient for awhile. Meh, it isn't what I want but it would let me see the top of my table again!

How do you organize it all? Enquiring minds want to know!

Letters, pen pals & smash books

Smash books remind me of the crazy little journals I kept as a youngster and the supplies available for making this modern version of the scrap book/art journal are just too much for me to resist any longer. I've seen some very cool smash books and decided today that it was time to combine my curiosity of them with letter writing and pen pals. I have a small stash of Moleskines I haven't used yet and one of those will be my first smash book.

I think I might start a round robin sort of thing and send the smash book to others who are interested in adding to it then sending it on to the next person or back to me. If I do that, anyone would be welcome, even those who, like me, aren't very creative. Those interested in art/journaling would be welcome to add whatever they choose to it. I think it could be a neat project and a lot of fun.

I'm also going to use one of my larger Moleskines to create a new correspondence smash log. I'm not sure yet exactly how I'll do it but I think it would be wise to organize it by date rather than person. Perhaps a tab for the month then fill the pages with notes about what I received from whom, what I sent out and to whom, photos of the actual letters, my thoughts on them, etc. It would certainly be more interesting than the spiral notebooks I've used all these years! I don't think I'll switch entirely to that concept for keeping track of correspondence because that would be too time consuming for me. But to make one now and then would be fun, I think.

Today I picked up a few things for LetterMo, general correspondence and creating the small smash book. I just happened on them and had a few dollars on me so I bought what I could; stickers, three small booklets of pages, some smash tape, and a smash pen.

Be still, my heart!