Whether you're making jewelry either professionally or as a hobby, you need somewhere to put all your stuff. This promotes efficiency and organization.

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Your stuff is probably going to include some or all of the following: adhesive, beading design board, beads, clasps, craft knife, crimp beads, crystal, findings, flat-nose pliers, fiber, gemstones, glass microscope slides, lamp-work beads, leather cord, mallet, memory wire, needles, needle-nose pliers, polymer clay, resin jewelry molds, scissors, sequins, seed beads, spacer beads, stringing material, wood, wire, wire-cutters, and more! In addition, your supplies are likely to be small and numerous such as beads, which would be a disaster to pick up and organize if accidentally spilled.

I've collected tons of crafts stuff over the years. Before I can start a project, let alone do it efficiently, I need to have a place for everything and everything in its place. The first thing I try to do is to have a table dedicated to crafts only. That way I can leave jewelry-making projects sitting upon it while I tend to the day-to-day stuff in my life.

This doesn't always work. Horizontal spaces such as tabletops have a way of collecting clutter. To work with this inevitability, I have a number of inexpensive trays on which I can lay out beading or other projects.

The trays don't have to be fancy, but they do have to have a lip or rim to catch any supplies that might be inclined to roll or bounce off. With each project assigned to a tray, I can move them back and forth to the tabletop as needed – for example, to dust the table from time to time.

The other trick that has worked for me is to go vertical with my storage. I spent some extra money on this, but the basic premise is adaptable to anyone's budget.

Essentially, you want to store things on a wall, pegboard, or bookcase that takes up less floor space and arranges your stuff from top to bottom. This is always preferable to spreading things out horizontally right to left unless you're lucky enough to have a big studio containing, say, an eight-foot table to dedicate to your projects.

Here I started with a five-foot tall rolling pantry from Skymall.com (yes, indeed, the website that has a magazine that you find in your seat-pocket on airline flights). It's on wheels for easy movement and its dimensions are 60-inches tall by 24-inches wide by 10-inches deep. Not bad! That doesn't use much floor space at all.

I cut down and painted a peg-board to hang on one end. Then I put a spice-rack on that peg-board to contain spice-jars full of beads and little supplies as well as the occasional bottle of adhesive or whatever. The top rack of the rolling pantry is great for crafts books.

The other things I've found helpful in getting organized are those locking plastic boxes that come in crafts stores. They come in two styles: (1) with square compartments and (2) with compartments that look square but are curved at the bottom.

You want option #2, especially if you like working with seed-beads. It's much easier to trap a bead under your fingertip and work it up a curved slope than to get it into the intersection of two right-angles and try to scrape it up a vertical wall. In the photos, I show option #1 with my gambling themed stuff and option #2 with my pink and clear beads.