Does the 18 inch American Girl® doll in your life have a lot of shoes? I know I have a lot of models here at Oh Sew Kat!, but even if I put two pair on each doll, I’d still have doll shoes to spare. There’s just something about the finishing touch of a handmade doll outfit being just the right pair of shoes.
A Quick and Inexpensive Way to Organize Doll Shoes in 15 minutes – Colorful Book Bins
It can be challenging to keep all of the little shoes, necklaces, food, hair bows etc for your dolls not only organized, but easily accessible for doll play. Just like many of you, this is an endless struggle. When my daughter was young and played dolls all of the time, we kept these items mostly sorted in binned drawers. This was fairly easy to maintain, as long as you were not looking for anything specific at any time. A 10x10x10 drawer of doll shoes made it hard to even find a match! Try this easy solution and get it all organized in less than 15 minutes in a way that she can find what she wants, but she can also easily put them all back away when she’s done.
Book bins are the perfect shoe storage solution- get organized in less than 15 minutes for less than $15
Recently, walking through the big box stores, I saw these colorful sets of book bins. Designed for classrooms and book shelves, they are higher in the back than in the front and can lock together side by side. I snatched up a few packs- different stores had different prices, but they were $3-10 per set of six or seven bins.
Easily sort doll shoes and organize them in a way that is easy to use and easy to put away.
I started by simply pulling out all of the doll shoes and sorting them into piles by color to see how much I had of each color. In some cases, I had to split out even a little further. For example, I have a lot of doll boots, so I sorted them by color away from the shoes for the moment. Once they were sorted by color, I put them in the corresponding colored bin. This only works for some of them, of course, but it’s an easy place to start.
Once that easy sorting was done, I lined the bins up on the shelves I had for storage. You can line them up along a wall or at the bottom of a closet as well. I realized that in some colors, I had very few shoes at all (purple and orange), and other colors were overflowing (black). So the purple bin became black or gray, and I added the purple shoes to the orange bin to save a little space. In the end, the black and brown boots stayed apart, but the white boots ended up with the white shoes since there were just a few of them.
Organize your 18 inch doll shoes so you can see them all at once and still put them away easily.
You can see from the photo above that the bins all have a little clear pocket on the front. You can make labels to help your organization if you like. These bins are also great to sort other doll items like accessories (glasses, purses, bows, headbands) and even things like doll food and doll dishes. Fun, functional and pretty – and best of all – they didn’t break the bank!
I can now easily add the perfect shoes to each outfit with very little searching after sorting my doll shoes into these fun and functional book bins on a small bookshelf. For now, I have smaller dolls shoes in their own boxes as I do not have nearly as many, but at some point, it may just be easier to have all the green shoes in the green bin no matter the size. We will see how it goes!! In the meantime, happy organizing!!
Fun and functional book bins are great organization for your 18 inch doll shoe collection.
Oh Sew Kat! 