I’ve had a laser for, hmmm, 5 years now? Because I love and must have ALL THE COLORS, I have accumulated quite the collection of acrylic sheets! Here you will find an easy hack for storing and organizing your 12″ x 18″ acrylic sheets.
Now, some naysayers may tell you not to store your acrylic sheets on their edge. While that may hold truer for wood that can warp (though I go through mine so fast I don’t have that problem even with wood), you should not have a problem with acrylic on its side. I used to have vertical Elfa shelving from the Container Store in my old space and it was very challenging to get out the sheets on the bottom of my even smallish stacks. Just look at this mess! Each stack was no more than a few inches high, but acrylic is HEAVY. It worked in my space, but wasn’t the ideal solution overall.
When I finally got to build my new studio (on our 3rd floor that we renovated), the first thing I asked the builder for was lots and lots of shelving for my ever growing acrylic collection.
The perfect place for me to put a big shelf was along the stairwell leading up to the 3rd floor. It wasn’t really usable space anyway, just a wide hallway to get into the workable space. And my two lasers are across from them in a nook by the window.
(I do promise to eventually share a walk through of my whole new studio space. It is AMAZING and such a dream! I’m still putting some finishing touches on it, but stay tuned if you want to see an epic craft room.)
I had no problem filling all this glorious shelving with acrylic, but each cubby is 21″ wide, and you can fit A LOT of acrylic in each cubby. Even though they’re on their sides, flopping the stack to the side to get out the piece I need was still challenging, because, you know, acrylic is heavy. I put a scrap bucket in the middle of the shelf so that at least only half the sheets would fall on each other (or my hand) when looking for what I needed.
So what could I use to separate these heavy stacks of acrylic??? And then I had an A HA moment. Lid or cutting board organizers for the kitchen! I looked for the longest one I could find on Amazon, which ended up being only 13.5″, and also the one with the most distance between prongs, about 2″. It also needed to be low profile (I didn’t want to raise the sheets too much off the shelf).
I settled on this one and it is great. Now, if I could find one that was 20″ long it would be perfect! But the organizer is sturdy enough, and the acrylic heavy enough, that it does not move when flipping through smaller 2″ sections of acrylic, and I can keep each section separated by color. I’ll be doing another shelf with glitters, frosted, patterns… you get the idea. My collection is immense.