My Nail Polish Swatch Book

Yeah, sounds weird right? And at first, when I was creating it, I thought to myself, this is either the stupidest or best idea I've ever had. You tell me. LOL!!!

My friends all seem to like it. It was certainly easier that fiddling around with 400 swatch spoons to pick a color. All my polishes are in drawers and I don't like people messing with them (<-contol freak much??).

Anyway, I swatched my whole stash to spoons but I still wasn't satisfied. I felt like people would just pick the first polish they saw and not really put much time into looking through the spoons. I mean, when I started glue-ing down the spoons, I realized I don't notice most of my collection either. The spoons just aren't practical. They're better than nothing, and maybe this isn't perfect either, but this is about ten steps up from rifling through spoons. So I'm happy with it.

It's not quite finished yet. I have all my close to 400 spoons glued in. I would like  add a cute polish picture to the front cover to fill the frame and maybe add some tabs with the brand names.This scrapbook was $3 at the local craft store.

I only filled about 6 pages total, so there's plenty of room to grown and I divided the spoons by brands, leaving room for me to add more spoons at a later point, when I buy more of that particular brand. 

I also considered doing this on a large piece of poster-board, but ultimately just went with a book. 

Here are a couple of pitfalls I overcame while completing this project: 

1. I wrote on the spoons with black marker. So when I went to glue the spoons down onto the black pages, I couldn't even read the words. So I quickly scrapped that idea and used white scrapbook paper between the spoons and the pages. 

2. I started using plain old Elmer's craft glue for gluing down the spoons. I tried it on a page and let it dry over night. Well, when they dried, I picked them up and the spoons just started falling off. So you need something a little stronger. I switched to a glue specially made for gluing rhinestones. It's sold at any craft store. It's good and strong and holds well, even when you shake and bend the pages. 

3. Don't glue the spoons too close together. Otherwise, when you bend the page, there is no "give" and the spoons will push each other off. If you look closely at the photos, you can see that I left a very small gap in between the spoons. This is a necessary step!!! 

So what do you think of my Nail Polish Swatch Book??? Can you see the value in organizing your swatch spoons this way? What method are you currently using?