Felt Balls, My Jewellery Shed And More Organizing

Any of you who read my blog regularly will know I moved my jewellery making stuff into a garden shed earlier this year. I'm well and truly settled in now but every so often I'm struck with how I can improve the way my shed is organized. One of the things I'm limited by is the fact it is a garden shed that's been clad so I can't just stick things up on the walls willy nilly. The cladding is attached to battens so if I want to put anything on the wall I have to screw it through the cladding and into a batten. Which obviously stops me putting things anywhere I want. This means I have to find other ways to attach things to the wall sometimes. I bought some magnetic strips on ebay a while ago with the idea of using them to hold some of my small metal tools. They also proved really useful to use with fridge magnets to hold bits of paper {all with very important things written on them of course} within easy reach when I'm working. This idea then made me think I needed some more fridge magnets and a look on ebay and Etsy and being surprised at the price of some of them made me think about making my own.

So I bought some disc magnets and combined the magnets with another thing I had a strange urge to possess for no apparent reason....... felt balls. I bought them in different colours and glued the magnets to them to make my own felt ball magnets!

The felt ball magnets that aren't being used live on my cabinet until they are needed. They are very well behaved and don't need much looking after. They do enjoy listening to a bit of the Stone Roses occasionally {quite loudly and from the 2nd album preferably}. They are quite sociable and form their own family groups although their colour coordination skills leave a lot to be desired. The two at the bottom are getting on very well.

Felt balls at work holding my print outs for orders. The magnetic strips have an adhesive strip on one side so I can stick them to the wall. You can just see a bit of the magnetic strip at the top of the paper.

These three {nice colour grouping!} normally hold up a sheet of paper that I scrawl ideas and things to do on.

Thankfully none of my cats have noticed the felt balls yet because I dread to think what would happen when a cat tries to play with felt balls with magnets attached to them.........

My slightly nomadic pliers have now found themselves a permanent home too. The problem wasn't what to put them in or on it was the lack of space available to put whatever the pliers were in or on {hope you're following this....}. They now reside on the plastic pliers holder under my work bench.

They sit in the cardboard drawer that serves to keep my emery papers under control and it works as I know exactly where to reach for when I need them! I got rid of the ledge shelf thing that came with my bench and sat on the runner you can see to the left of the pliers in the photo as it was a bit useless and got in the way of my hammers and things.

My needle files have a permanent home too - good old magnetic strips strike again! The files have made it very clear they are not prepared to share their magnetic strips with any of those weird felt balls though.........

Here's a photo I've taken of me "working" at the bench just to prove I don't spend all my time glueing little magnets to felt balls. I'm going to get round to doing my "About" page for my Etsy shop soon so took a few photos for that today.

There is a little blue felt ball in this photo though. Can you see it?