Do you have a storage tip? Email it to me at tips@metalsmithsociety.com
Music attribution: Stock Music provided by RomanSenykMusic, from Pond5
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Welcome to Jewelry Making Tips with Metalsmith Society the ultimate podcast for anyone passionate about the art of jewelry making. I'm your host, Corkie Bolton. Metalsmith Society is a community on Instagram that has over 240,000 individuals, from professional jewelers to small business artisans, hobbyists, students and even those curious looky-loos eager to learn about jewelry making. Together, we share tips, kindness and even those curious looky-loos eager to learn about jewelry making. Together, we share tips, kindness and support. In this podcast, I will discuss tips from the Instagram page, provide deeper insights, address questions and share bonus tips that often surface in the comments section. So, whether you've been making jewelry for a while or you're just starting your jewelry making journey, this podcast is your go-to resource for all the jewelry making tips. So grab your tools, dust off your workbench and join me. In today's episode, I'm discussing one of my favorite topics organization and storage tips. As jewelers, we have a ton of things to organize All of the tools, all the raw materials, chains, findings, gemstones. I think. To date, we've shared about a hundred storage and organization tips, but I don't have time to talk about all of them, so today I'm just going to focus on storing your raw materials, your sheet metals, your wire, your chains. So I hope it's helpful and stay tuned.
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The first tip I'm going to share is a system that'll work for your sheet metal, your wire decorative bezels. It's a really awesome tip. I actually shared it and gave shout outs to multiple members of our community in my book. A few of those folks are Cindy Libel Jewelry, Zill Jewelry and Lynde Howe Silverworks. So thank you for sharing this, and every time it's been shared it's a slightly different iteration.
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The tip is to use hanging file folders to organize your metal. So think about it With hanging file folders you can label each folder. You can put the metal inside of a plastic bag, inside the folder to prevent it from tarnishing. I use this tip to organize all of my sheet metal, all of my round wire, my half round wire decorative bezels that I might have a large quantity of. It's a really great system. You can also put the reorder number, item number of the product right on it. You could even write down what the cost is. That would be a great way to understand your costs later on for a particular piece. Then, depending on how much metal you have, I mean you could use a filing cabinet and have it absolutely filled with silver. That sounds super dreamy. You can also purchase some of these expandable folders that are really affordable and you can use that if you have less materials. I also like how Lynde Howe Silverwork shared this tip. She uses plastic crates that roll around her studio and they're those crates that you use for hanging folders, and she could kind of wheel them around and make them accessible wherever she's working in her studio, so I thought that that was a really nice addition to the tip.
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Ever since I started working exclusively in gold last year, I wanted a way to organize my gold, but obviously I don't have enough to fill a filing cabinet, so I found a coupon organizer and you can find a ton of those on Amazon I will link one in the show notes and they are much smaller and great for organizing maybe materials that you have a smaller quantity of which, in my case, is definitely my gold. Now there are two camps when it comes to storing chain. There's folks like me who just buy maybe a dozen chains at a time. I'm not doing a lot of production and so therefore, I don't have spools of chain. That's the other camp People that are doing production and saving a ton of money by buying chain in bulk. Chain in bulk comes on a spool, and so this next tip was shared by Meg Girard. Meg used to work in the dental field and she uses something that is used to organize power chain for braces. It's a plastic container, it has a rod through the center and you can place your spools of chain directly on it and it will sit inside of this box and it's perfect because it helps prevent tarnish. You have all of your chains right there in front of you. It takes up very little space and it looks great. I'll link that in the show notes so that you can see it.
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Laura, my most recent podcast guest, also shared a tip for organizing chain. She uses carabiners to hang them on her pegboard. She has them divided up by lengths and chain types. She's fortunate enough that she's going through chains regularly so she doesn't need to worry about tarnish so much. If you haven't heard her interview, it's her tips for successfully selling jewelry through Instagram. I will link it in my show notes and I highly recommend you listening. So then, if we go back to the person like me who only uses a few chains at a time, what I recommend is keep your chain inside the plastic bag that it came in. It will have your reorder number on it. You can even write directly onto the bag what you paid for it, and then you can use a plastic container that has different compartments and just put those different types of chains together.
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So I put my rollo chains with my rollo chains, I put my curb chains with my curb chains and I can kind of see my inventory, but they're not just like hanging out in a box chilling chaotically. Sometimes when you buy bulk wire it also comes on this large black spool and if that's the case you could try this tip from Harmonize Jewelry. They shared that you can use a Christmas ribbon organizer for placing these spools of wire inside, and the solution looks great. I'll have to follow up with them on finding this particular one, but it did send me down a rabbit hole of ribbon organizers and that looks like it could also be a potential solution for storing spools of chain wire and other things. So I'll have to report back in the future about how it goes for me, but I did order one.
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When it comes to storing solder, a really simple solution is a stacking round tray that each container screws onto the next one, and what I like about those is you can label them easy, medium, hard. If you start to get into working in gold, you can add a few layers, because you know you can stack easily six, seven, eight of them altogether. But for folks just starting out, you can buy ones that have maybe four layers and you can put those basic you know silver solders that you have in there. Know silver solders that you have in there. This is truthfully, one of those things that if you go to the tip search page and you search the term solder storage, you're going to find a lot of different solutions that you know maybe don't involve having to buy a container, but you can check out what other members of the community have done to solve this problem.
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But just talking about, you know, those little plastic containers for crafting really you know they are so helpful for storing all types of findings and little materials in your studio. I have these plastic trays that have 24 round containers inside of them and each container has a lid and I use these to store all of my earring posts, earring backs. I use them to store my findings and because I'm working in 18 karat gold, 14 karat gold, and I still have a ton of sterling silver stuff, I can label each one and really keep them organized by metal. They also work great if you have bulk stones. You know I bought a lot of CZs to practice on, so I have them labeled and categorized by color and size and then these trays stack on top of each other and they don't take up much space in your studio. So they're a great simple solution, but there really are so many solutions out there. So there's a few ideas for you. I highly recommend you go check out your local secondhand shops. You know, with organizing being so popular these days, there are so many containers out there in the world that we can use in our studios without having to buy something brand new.
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I will definitely plan to talk about more organization and storage tips in future episodes. There's so many to go over. If you have an organizing tip that you'd like to share with our community, please email me at tips@ metalsmithsociety. com. I'd love to feature you. Thanks for tuning in today. Your support means the world to me. If you enjoyed today's episode and want to keep the podcast going, I would love if you would follow along and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, leave a review or let others know what you think, share the podcast with your friends and family and consider becoming my patron on Patreon. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll see you next time. Bye.