How I organise- inks

MY INK SWATCH BOOK AND DISTRESS INK SWATCH

If you've read my How I Organise- Cardstock section, you'll know that I store both my cardstock and ink swatches in this Simple Stories Snap Binder and these Insta-Pocket Page Protectors. 

Right in the front I have my PTI inventory which list which cardstock, ink, ribbon and felt I have for each colour. I then have the same for SU though I mainly just have the cardstock and only a few inks and ribbons.

The second section of my cardstock/ink swatch book is for inks. I organise the swatches in the same colour order as my cardstock swatches. The majority of my inks are either PTI or SU. I do have a couple of Mama Elephant, a couple of really old Versa Color inks which are wearing well and a couple of metallic pads. 

As with my cardstock, I don't separate the inks by manufacturer- just by colour.  Here are the greens.

The blues...

Purples...

Reds.

I use the Simon Says Stamp Clear Stamp Swatches stamp set to stamp the swatches. 

I don't do a lot of inky stamping (if you know what I mean) as I prefer to choose stamps that need to be hand-coloured but I do use coloured inks a lot for stamping sentiments and that, in part, is why my inks are largely restricted to PTI and SU because I can stamp a sentiment with coloured ink knowing it will match the cardstock and papers I've selected for that project.

Having said that, I have just invested in the whole range of Tim Holtz Distress Ink Mini pads purely with a view to doing some watercoloring of stamped images. I printed out this template to create a Distress Ink swatch of all my colours. I've done an A4 swatch like my copic swatch rather than individual swatches as I did for my other inks because I will be using the Distress Inks largely for colouring so it is much more useful for me to see them at a glance on one sheet and in relation to each other.

INK STORAGE

I store most of my inks in 2" inserts (the same as I use for my embellishment storage) in four drawers of my Ikea Alex Drawer Unit.

 The top drawer has my PTI inks and a few other random larger pads I have. At the moment I haven't labelled the PTI ink storage because they are adding colours quite frequently at the moment which I will probably collect.

The second drawer contains my SU ink pads, a couple of ME pads, Versamark Glue pad, embossing powders and frantage plus glitter tray.

The third drawer contains my distress inks. I've labelled all of these and arranged them alphabetically rather than by colour as this is what's most useful to me trying to find something off my ink swatch. I'm not sure I'll buy any further colours so I thought it was OK to label like this.

Another gratuitous shot- they just looks so pretty, no? x