Me and My Promarker Storage

Hi everyone - hope you're having a nice weekend, and that you have all coped with the incredible snowfalls we've been having! Luckily all our snow has now gone almost as fast as it came, though yesterday we were looking out at a winter wonderland!

Today I have something rather different to show you. For some time I had been getting really fed up with my Promarker storage - up until yesterday it looked like this ....

Yep ... an old DVD box which was full to bursting with a variety of Promarkers, Flexmarkers and a handful of Copics thrown in for good measure.

Looking for particular pens was a nightmare which involved emptying the box out all over the table and ruffling through it whilst peering at my colour chart - what a waste of time I've not got to play with!! Something just had to be done!

I had googled around for ideas, and had been particularly tempted by this one  by Nicky - using a DJ's CD flight case. This seemed like a brilliant idea to me, so I decided to look into it a bit more. it particularly appealed as I don't have a dedicated craft room so couldn't build a fixed storage rack - it needed to be portable.

Nicky got her case from Tesco, but unfortunately they don't seem to stock it any more so I looked around online. I definitely wanted one that I could pick up from a store rather than buy online (I couldn't see it fitting through the letterbox lol!) and after some searching I  found this one in Maplin ...

Now Nicky used a 200 CD case and this was a 300, so I wasn't sure whether it would be too big .. it was the same width and height but half as deep again as the 200 CD version. However I reasoned that I not only have standard Promarkers but also 3 seasonal sets and some Flexmarkers as well ... and when I saw it in store I decided to go for it!

This box isn't a standard silver "DJ case" but is kinda slightly mesh-look black colour - quite smart I thought.

Inside it has room for 2 "rows" of insert pockets, of which 150 are supplied with the case.

Before I could get started I bought a pack of teeny rectangular labels (from WH Smith) with which to decorate the pockets, and a pack of teeny round labels (from Staples) to decorate the end of each pen.

I printed off nice clean colour charts for Promarkers and Flexmarkers from the Letraset site, and coloured in the colours I own - I could then see the order in which to display the pens in the case.

Each inner pocket is capable of storing up to 7 pens, so I just went through methodically creating labels for every colour on the chart  - colouring those I own, and leaving white those I don't. (I actually coloured the labels first and then wrote text on top - otherwise the pen will smudge :-)  ).  I have now decided that I am going to tape the row of labels onto each pocket - but I didn't have any  narrow sellotape to hand so will do that in the near future.

I also coloured matching labels to stick onto the bullet end of each pen.

I kept going until I had covered the whole of the main Promarker colour chart, followed by the seasonal colour chart (I packed these 6 to a pocket - one pocket for each seasonal set).  last but not least I created pockets for my Flexmarker 6-pen sets, plus one for a few Flexmarker "singles".

I popped my colour charts into plastic envelopes - they are the perfect size to store in the lid!

And voila! Here's the final result.

All in all this took about 4 hours' work but I'm pretty pleased with it - I can see that my colouring sessions are going to be much more productive from now on. All that's now missing is the rest of the Promarkers to fill the gaps ;-)

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and thanks for looking.

Hugs