Organizing Cookie Cutters {WFMW}

August 3, 2011 | 127 Comments »

Okay, you’ve set aside a few hours, you have all of the ingredients, and a ton of  ideas then suddenly, all activity comes screeching to a halt.  It’s time to play “Find That Cutter”.  The next hour is spent searching, usually in vain, for that elusive [insert shape] cutter, you saw only last week!

Sound familiar?

I own a LOT of cookie cutters.  And by a lot, I mean WELL over a thousand.  This is not really necessary, I mean really, you can do almost anything in the world with just a few square and round cutters, but I CANNOT STOP collecting them!

Problem is, I’m almost as good at losing cutters as I am at making cookies.

To save my sanity, and maybe my husband’s also, I had to come up with an organized way to store my rapidly growing cutter collection.

I’d love to tell you that I have a miracle way of fitting a thousand plus cutters in a 6×6 space {and so would my husband} but the truth is, my hobby takes a little bit of space. 

In my case, I’ve taken over our dining room.  Thank goodness we have a breakfast bar…

So, here it is. This is my cookie cutter collection.  PLEASE forgive me if you ever ask me where a cutter is from and I cannot remember.   At this point I can barely remember if I HAVE a certain shape, much less where I got it from.

What’s even crazier is, if you look closely you can see my collection is even beginning to trickle onto another set of shelves…but that’s a story for another day.

 

To store my cutters, I use two different sized bins, small ones like this

 

and larger ones like these.

 

To break them down even further, I divide them into categories that work for me.   A few of  these are: baby, sports, flowers, stars, and luau, but that is just the beginning.  There are many many more.

 If you need ideas for organizing, it might be helpful to head over to a site like Off the Beaten Path, {which also happens to be one of my favorite cookie cutter stores} to look at their categories.  You can use this as sort of a jumping off point and tweak it from there.

In case you are wondering why I use two different sized bins, this is the reason.  For broad categories, such as sports, the larger bins work great.  However, from time to time they can outgrow themselves, especially categories like Christmas.  In this case, I just divide the larger categories into subcategories.  For example, instead of a huge Christmas bin, I have several smaller bins.  One is trees. There are others that house several smaller categories that I associate with one another such as Santa and Rudolph or wreaths and holly.  Make sense? 

Of course, specifics may vary slightly from person to person, but I am *reasonably* confident that is you walked into my workroom for the very first time, you’d have a good chance of finding what you’re looking for.

To further simplify cutter hunting, I borrowed my hubby’s label maker and made removable labels for each bin.  Its better not to do this with something like a permanent marker so that it’s easier for bins to change as your collection does, and believe me, if you like cookie-ing as much as I do, it WILL.

Speaking of things not to do, meet the Basket of DOOM!  This is one of my many habits that annoys my husband beyond belief.  Sometimes I get in a rush and instead of immediately putting cutters away, I dump them all into this basket, which is great, UNTIL one basket turns into two and my husband I spend a whole Sunday putting them back where they belong!

So, avoid the day long organizing session, on DON’T do this!

Well, this is it, my cookie cutter collection, and where I keep them all! This storage method works well for me.  I love the bins because I can carry them from the dining room into the kitchen and back without a hassle. 

Whether you think flip flops belong in the luau box or the shoe and feet box, your cutters will be organized and ready to go when you need them.

This is only one part of my cookie room, the room formerly known as the dining room.  If you want to see more, let me know, I’d love to give y’all the grand tour!

I hope this storage solution works for you too.  Happy Wednesday everyone!

Storage and Organization, Tips
127 Comments »