More Pretty Craft Storage - Altered Jar Mini-Tutorial

You all know how much I love flowers, and I use them in almost all my crafty projects. Well, I've got quite the collection of flowers and I used to store them in their individual packages or little baggies and whatnot. While organizing my craft room, I decided to use this large jar to store my whole collection of flowers so it can sit on the shelf as a pretty and inspiring piece in the room. The lid was stained wood, and I painted it using a rag with purple, pink and turquoise acrylic paint. I cut the pink scalloped rectangle and the turquoise label from my the Storybook Cricut Cartridge (Thank you, Consumer Crafts). I punched holes at each end of the label and tied the pretty ribbon through to hold the label onto the jar. I stamped the word "Flowers" using the Classic alphabet stamps from Stampin' Up. Finally, I embellished it with a multi-layered flower, of course! Aren't flowers just the perfect embellishment?

The jar coordinates perfectly with the rest of my craft room and the cardboard caddy I made, too.

Pantry Organization

An organized pantry is essential during the holidays when the kitchen is in full gear! All the holiday baking and entertaining will go much more smoothly if you know what's in your pantry and where to find it. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, my pantry was in total chaos. I decided to spend a little chunk of time getting this chaos under control. We have limited cabinet space in our kitchen, but a very large corner pantry. So the pantry doubles as storage for pots and pans.

I started the organization by pulling everything out of the pantry. Yep, everything! I pitched food that was expired and consolidated food that we had more than one container of. I moved some infrequently used pots to the cabinet in our garage that I use for kitchen overflow. This freed up a lot of space.

Then, I grouped like items together and began stocking my pantry back up, grocery store style.

And here's the finished product! Can you tell I love pasta? A whole shelf dedicated pasta and a second shelf dedicated to pasta sauce makings! Bottom shelf holds baking items. I like the basket for bags of chocolate chips and nuts and such.

The pic below shows the snack basket on the bottom shelf so when Taylor wants a snack she can just grab her own.

I didn't snap a shot of the floor of the pantry but it's home to all of our cases of soda and juice boxes.

My plan is to label the shelves so that everything goes back where it belongs and everything is put in the right place when unpacking groceries. BUT...I can't find my label maker! I know it's somewhere in my craft room! That's my next organization project.

Mini Fabric Bolts from Cardboard Boxes

This is one of the best organization ideas I've seen in a LONG time. I LOVE IT! I'm totally going to organize my fabric like this! A great way to use up all the empty cardboard boxes in my garage and organize my fabric at the same time. You can find the tutorial here. Thanks for sharing, Fawnda!

30 Meals Project!

So, I just discovered the girls over at Nanny Goat. They are Awwwwesooommmme. Love them already and I've only known them for like, 20 minutes :). They've come up with an ingenius (and crafty and pretty, to boot!) system for meal planning. Be sure to CHECK IT OUT! It's sooo simple! I'm definitely going to be joining in the fun of creating the system and the fun of eating yummy stress free meals!

Such a Great Idea!

I've been too tired the last few days to get any crafting done, so I'll show you another link to a really cool project! This door knob organizer is ingenious! I could have written her post about forgetting things on my way out the door. I don't even know how many times I head back into the house in the morning after getting to the car.

I'm trying to figure out if the door knob organizer would actually work for me. I'm thinking a certain rugrat would take everything out of the pocket and totally defeat the purpose. And, of course, that would cost me even more time because I would have to figure out where she decided to put the contents of the pocket. Oh...wait...I could always create a flap with a button so the rugrat couldn't open the pocket! Hmmm...I guess there's my reason to learn to use my button hole feature on my sewing machine.

Altered File Box Turned Craft Tote!

I still haven't decided on my Tidy Up Basket. But, I thought I'd share my craft tote with you. Last month when I was packing up for Craft Night at my friend Jen's, I was wishing I had a box with a handle that I could stash my supplies in for easy transport on craft night. The next day, as I was browsing one of my fave thrift stores I came across this box! When I found it, it was plain beige and it really good shape. So, being the Crafty Mom that I am, I scooped the thing up for a mere $3.00 and reached for my glue gun, mod podge, ribbon and patterned paper and voila! I now have a stylin' crafty tote for craft night!

A Tidy Up Basket

That's what I need. I feel like my craft space is in a constant state of needing to be tidied up. It's seems as though I am constantly putting things away, yet my desk is always a mess (Perhaps it seems that way because it actually is at that way!). You see, the fact that hubby & I actually share this office space means that when he meets with clients, he needs some space on the desk I use for crafting. So, he tells me "Hey, so and so is coming over, clear some space". So, I basically take the stuff that's accumulated on the desk and shove it to one end of the desk, thus "clearing space". Not a very efficient or organized method. So, I'm left with a pile of supplies and miscellaneous things at the end of our not so big desk that then need to be put away or searched through when I'm doing my next project. I think if I had a "Tidy Up Basket" I could contain all of the stuff and set it out of the way when hubby needs the space and then put the items away where they belong when I have a free moment. What do you think? Sounds like a good system, to me. Off to find a basket...