Workspace

The blue Caboodle's case on top is what used to hold my collection.

Well, if I'm gonna be completely honest, organization has never been my strong suit. For the longest time I stored all my polishes in a Caboodle's case. When I out grew that, they went into a plastic sliding drawer thing. No real rhyme or reason, just colors I used a lot toward the front and older, more unused ones got pushed to the back. Not bad, but you couldn't see the colors. You just had to know what was in there and what the cap looked like. I want to SEE the bottles. It helps so much when designing nail art.

After the jump check out my set up now.

Yeah, that really looks like a lot of polish when you lay it all out in front of you.
I was using the Monster Manual as a riser when I was taking photos of my bottles.

As my collection grew I kept adding more boxes and things, but the main problem persisted, I couldn't see my bottles. Bins and drawers hid them away. I considered shelves for a while, but my nail "workshop" is on our screened-in front porch. Only one side had wood walls, the other 3 sides are mostly windows, and I don't want to cut off the natural light coming in. I put up with the boxes for a few months till one day at Goodwill I spotted these:

Cthulhu just chilling and protecting my polish. Or trying to steal it. You can't trust Cthulhu.

These stack-able, open-faced bins are working wonderfully for me! And as my collection grows I can keep getting more. Stack 'em to the ceiling! LOL I now have space on my table again, and I can see my bottles!

Here's a little guided tour of my nail desk:

This handy little tin holds tools, gems, and some other odds and ends. Files, stampers, scrapers, dotting tools, buffing blocks, orange sticks, tweezers  nail art pens, magnets (for magnetic polishes), gems, decals....you get the point. Little stuff that tends to get lost in the clutter. Also over here are packs of cheap fake nails for my practice finger and bigger materials like tape and bamboo skewers.

On the other side I have bottles of remover, glue, thinner and the special cotton swabs for manicures (pointed on one end, paddle on other). The big 3 ring binder holds all my stamping plates (another post on that shortly).

And up front is my working space. Paper towels down to clean off the dotting tool, or blot spilled water or polish. Here I have it set up for some water marbling I was practicing.

4 trays.  99 cents each. I love Goodwill.

And a closer look at the open-faced stack-able bin tray things. What are they called? Do they have a name? Something better than open-faced stack-able bin tray things? Anyway, I've organized the polish by brand. No real reason other than bottles of the same shape look better next to each other. Tried organizing by color but didn't like it as much. I have my Nail Polish Journal for color matching. Hope this gives everyone out there with large collections an idea on how to store your polishes!