I often get asked: ”How do you store all your materials for your DIY:s?”
The short answer is: I store it a bit here and there! 
The longer answer: It depends on what I store, and what it looks like. Unfinished projects I tend to store around the room (i.e. my study), like this unfinished blanket that gets to sit and be pretty in a large glass jar.
I look for storage items when going to flea markets, like the bowls in the picture above. I store buttons and beads in those. 
More buttons in an old glass jar that I got more than 20 years ago. And a crystal bowl containing my hair pins.
I try to see how I can make the environs both functional and beautiful at the same time, so I tend to store things out in the open quite a lot.
Think candy shop, or pretty craft shop or something. I bought the clear containers when a DIY-store went bankrupt and sold off most of their things for nearly nothing.
I also have drawers full of DIY-things, like this drawer above filled with stuff I use to make my recycled bracelets and necklaces. 
The drawers are filled with the stuff. I think of them as my treasure chests!
I try to create environments with lots of customized storage, like this old TV-table that we bought second hand and repurposed for my room. I use free fruit crates to store pieces of lace and old flowers. 
I just throw the materials in the crates any which way.
Then when I’m creating something out of the pieces, I lay them out on the table and sort them according to color or materials.
The trick is to use the things, in that way you know what you have where. Sometimes I forget what I have in a particular drawer, but then it gets to be a nice surprise and usually sparks some bit of my imagination and creative nerve.
I also collect pretty jars and cans and store things in them, like paper flowers, cutouts, smaller decorations.
I store a lot of knitting needles, feathers and flowers in the window behind my desk.
I had a lot of chips-cans years ago that I glued pretty paper onto.
I store rulers and stuff like that in those behind the computer screen. 
To the right on my desk I always have a stack of books. Books I’m reading through, books I need to reference and the pink bag contains stuff from my purse that I don’t need at the moment, but that I can always collect at a moments notice (like membership cards to shops or unimportant stuff like that).
The large turquoise cupboard contains a lot of materials. I try to arrange them so that they look inviting when I take a peak into the cupboard.
I store my DIY jewelry in an old box. It feels awesome to open the lid, like opening a treasure chest!
This tends to be the messiest part of my study – to the right of my computer. Here I store things I use daily, like my phone and my ipad, pens and notebooks.
I try to make use of every available space, including this little nook beside the bathroom wall that we turned into a small bookshelf. It contains see-through containers with beads, buttons, corks, feathers, birds… what have you.
My desk was a bit too short, so we extended it with this piece that we found at a flea market. I still haven’t gotten around to painting its surface yet! But someday, perhaps… In the meanwhile, it houses my printer, some boring looking paper and other things that aren’t pretty to look at (like my heat gun)
This little cupboard used to be a bedside table. It holds a lot of things: candles, Christmas items, decorative things for the garden.
And then there’s this white storage, that used to store our kids’ clothes and books when we lived in Copenhagen. It holds the majority of my materials: knick-knacks that I haven’t yet figured out what to do with, seeds for the garden, different kinds of glues, my sewing kit.
So there you have it! A little peak into how I store my materials.
My simple rules are:
- Find storage wherever you can
- If you don’t have concealed storage, try to store items in plain view in bowls, jars and cans. Think candy shop. Think storage in plain sight.
- Think outside the box: Are you sure you’ve actually used up all available storage in your home? Where can you cram in some storage? Does that thing really need to be in that particular place? How are you using your space? Is there somewhere you’re not really using, that could be used for storage instead? I do this for all our rooms in the whole house, including thinking about space in 3D terms, like hanging baskets and storage underneath the ceilings or by the floorboards.
- Go through your items regularly so you don’t forget what you have, and so that you end up using them instead of just hoarding…! This is useful for everything you own. Do you really need that particular thing or are you holding onto it for no particular reason? If so, donate it to someone else who might put it into use.
- Above all: have fun! If you’re happy with the way things are organized in your home, then try to enjoy it! And if you’re not, go back to the previous numbers on this list.
P.S. And yes, it is easier to store things when you live in a big house! But I managed to have nearly all this material in our old tiny apartment too – it just took a lot of creative thinking about where and what to store!