Building Things

Today was a very productive day for DH and I.  We got some errands done and then decided that it was time to organize our house a little more.

We started with this,

and this.

Any guesses on what we got?






We got one of these!

I've been wanting to get one of these for a while.  I have so many crafty things that I thought this would be the perfect solution without having to buy a bunch of tools so DH could make me a custom storage shelf.  It was even on sale.

So we spent the day putting it together along with installing a new shelf in the closet of DH's office so he would have some extra space too.  This thing was actually pretty easy to put together.  The instructions weren't the easiest to follow, but the pictures certainly helped.  A husband that understands how to put stuff like this together was helpful as well.

Once it was built, it looked like this:

Those off-colored squares are actually where the wall shows through.  It only has backing for five of the squares.  Please ignore the rest of the mess in the closet.

Then, I spent a couple hours cleaning my craft room, getting rid of stuff, and reorganizing so that this little baby now looks like this:

From left to right, top to bottom we have stamps, scrapbooking tools, fabric, scrapbooking decorations, cards and envelopes, Cricut supplies, random crafts, paint and coloring tools, and pictures and ribbon.  On top is my sewing box, a couple of old disposable cameras that I need to get developed and my iron.

I love having everything in its own little space and it's all so easy to find now.  I just need a better way to store my fabric and I'll be happy. 

How do you organize your crafts?

Organizing Fabric Swatches

Since I plan to make a quilt for our bed soon, I decided that I needed a way to look at all my fabric and even bring it with me when I'm going to select more.  I searched online and found a great idea, but unfortunately can't find the link anymore.  If you know who came up with the idea, please let me know so I can give them credit.

Anyway, here it is.

I cut out samples of each of the fabrics I have.  I don't have pinking shears so mine are ragged on the edges, but they'll still work.  I used my double sided scrapbooking tape to adhere them each to index cards then I wrote the place where I got each fabric so that I could remember in case I wanted to search for more.  Then I hole-punched them and put them onto a binder ring that I had leftover from one of my college classes.  Now I can grab the whole thing and bring it with me when I go to the store so I can easily compare fabrics and see if they would look good together. 


I'm sorry I haven't been posting much this week.  I'm in the middle of a couple different projects that I will be sharing next week so stay tuned. 

Meal Planning

I've been wanting to get more organized and after reading about the Organized and Inspired blog series starting over here

I decided to try out her first idea.  The first post is about meal planning.  She has some really cute printables available on her blog to help if you're not really sure how to start.  I've been making a list of all the dinner ideas I can think of.  I'm going to do this a little differently than she does.  I'll share my way a little later.  For now, it will be a piece of paper on the fridge, but I'm thinking about doing something to display our meals for the week to make my life easier. 

We tried meal planning a few years ago when we were really trying to budget and try to spend and waste less.  It worked for a little while but then we got lazy.  I'm hoping that having everything easily accessible will help us stick to it this time.

Working on it

While I haven't fully completed anything on my list lately, I'm working on a few things.

1.  On Saturday afternoon DH carried all of the empty picture frames we have into my craft room and told me that he wanted to put pictures in them.  Mostly, he wanted to use the new laser level he got for Christmas and that seemed like a good way to do that.  We couldn't do all of them.  I didn't realize how many 5x7 frames we had.  Since we have zero 5x7 photos right now we left those for another day.  We did manage to fill these two:

These were wedding gifts from DH's aunt.  They are now hanging in our house and I love having pictures up.  We put up some of our favorites from our wedding.  I wish it would have occurred to me to have DH use his laser level to put up some of the wall art we also got as wedding gifts.  But I'm happy with this for now. 

2.  I started playing around with a calligraphy book that I picked up for DH years ago.  I didn't realize there were so many fonts so I probably won't be learning all of them (although it looks like it would be easy to transfer the shapes).  I will pick one that I like and try to make all of the letters look pretty.  Then I'll declare that one done.  It needs a lot more work.  Some of the letters look nice.  Others do not.  Some look pretty darn sad. 

3.  It looks like I might finally be getting that storage shelf I've wanted for a while now.  Hopefully I can get it soon so that I don't have to have stuff scattered everywhere.

4.  I'm signed up to take a class at the junior college.  I'm waitlisted so I'm not sure if I'll get in.  I'm a little afraid.  I think I can learn the information easily, but the teacher wasn't exactly the friendliest person I've ever encountered.  I'm a little worried.

Recipe books

Today has been a very rainy, stormy day.  We had some flooding behind our house and there are a ton of storm warnings in our area so we decided to stay home today.  I took advantage of the opportunity to organize all of the recipes I've collected over the years.  I've got some from Everyday Food and Rachael Ray Magazine and tons of others as well.  That means I have a ton. 

I have two photo albums that are almost completely full of recipes.  One has about 100 openings and it is full of recipes for regular meals that one might make for dinner.  It's divided into sections like "chicken" or "pasta."  The other is twice the size and is full of desserts.  Going through that one gave me some inspiration to try some things tomorrow so that I can take them to work.  I'll be making some stuff to send to work with DH too. 

I like having it all organized now so that I actually have a chance at finding a recipe that I'm looking for.  It did make me hungry though. 

Reorganizing

I spent the better part of this afternoon going through our filing cabinet and getting rid of old paperwork and organizing it a bit to make it more user friendly.  While I like the end product, I'm exhausted.  There are a lot more things I wish I could get rid of because I don't think we'll ever need them, but I'm afraid something will come up a year or two down the road and I'll regret throwing some of that stuff out. 

If I had more energy I'd keep going.  I love the feeling that comes with a clean space.