Thrifty little storage boxes

You know the piles of stuff that gather around the house, especially on the surfaces?  Dining table or kitchen counter perhaps? These are most frequently paper in my flat. Mail, junk mail, notebooks, receipts, you name it.  

As Laura says on her blog, here and here, piles of stuff occur either when stuff doesn't have a home, or in the landing zones - the places we put stuff when we come in the house.   

I have one such pile in particular; receipts, because I just don't know where to put them.  I need them to keep a budget of what we spend, but I'm not the type to enter a single expense into the spreadsheet every time I buy something. This means that I need somewhere to keep the receipts in the meantime! I think the pile of receipts has the tendency to be moved around the room because I don't have a fixed place for them.....

UNTIL NOW! :) 

My ethos is to reuse wherever possible (read more about my ethos here).  I put a sturdy but small cardboard box from my hairdryer in the recycling, because I couldn't think of a use for it (after all I'm also trying to declutter my flat!). I managed to rescue it from impending recycling lorry death just in time when I thought of what I could use it for: little boxes to store receipts and other small items.  Yay :)

This is the box I started with:

I wanted it chopped in half so I could have two smaller boxes, so I drew a line around the centre:

And then cut along the line with a craft knife and scissors (you could use just one)

 

I found some cute (FREE) scrapbooking papers to print out, here (they come as pdf's). Another place for free papers is here.

I used some card to spread my PVA glue onto the box. A glue stick would be fine too (and perhaps better to stop the paper getting soggy)

I covered the box in white paper first to help hide the picture of my hairdryer.  I cut it diagonally to make it easier to fold over the edge.

Then I cut the scrapbook paper to size and folded it over the edge too. I left the red sides because I quite liked the colour, but it does leave the edges a bit untidy. 

I covered the second small box in a different scrapbook paper and went all the way round this time, because the hairdryer image was on this half.

Then onto LABELS!! Fun labels are great because you know exactly what is supposed to be in the box! 

I made these labels with Ribbet. You can use this tutorial here to read how to make labels in Picnik (which got shut down and replaced).  Everything in Ribbet is identical to Picnik except the background/logo and the name. 

I printed out the labels and stuck them on with a glue stick.

The boxes are done!

I named the other box "stickies" because it has all my post-its, adhesive labels, and stickers in it, i.e. anything that sticks!  I like it. 

Before and after shot:

My life will be that little bit more organised now I have a fixed place for my receipts! Small steps! 

Anyone else been coming up with thrifty storage solutions?

I'm linking up to:

Quick post: wastepaper basket

We wanted a wastepaper basket in every room, because the flat is long and sometimes it's too much effort to walk to the kitchen!  I had 2 already, for the study and bedroom.  Since most of our time is spent in the lounge, we figured that we really needed one in there too.

When I unpacked my craft box I found the packing paper I'd saved, and decided that it was perfect to make a woven basket out of (instead of buying one).  I decided on blue for the living room a while ago, so I went with blue strips for the highlights:

 It's a small basket, but big enough to hold all those itty bits that accumulate! I just put a small plastic bag in it to keep the paper nice and clean!

So, there you go, a waste paper basket made from waste paper! Perfect.  See my previous basket, here.  Click here for the tutorial.

-Linda

Hello blogworld

I've decided to give blogland a whirl.  The main purpose of this blog is to keep a record of my projects - which happen when inspiration strikes me - anytime! I am open to and love all the different materials out there, and LOVE learning new techniques.  The internet is pretty awesome for inspiration these days, with all the inhabitants of blogland and Pinterest of course!

It started with knitting, then moved onto crochet, patchwork, re-upholstery, finger-knitting, applique (haven't tried it yet), and I'm sure there are plenty more where those came from.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about and figuring out what I enjoy doing, and from that I've developed my "ethos":

Re-use something if possible, re-purpose, recycle.  This means acquiring materials from charity shops, scrapstores and the like.  When I visit a fabric shop the first stop is the remnants bin.  Some would call it "make-do and mend".  If I have to buy new fabric, just because, erm.... I'm incredibly impatient, I will only look at the "reduced to clear" section.  Quilting cotton can cost anything up to £20 per metre, and jeez I don't think I could justify spending that much on a bit of cotton fabric, just out of principle. 

Here is a picture of a basket I made from simple brown packing paper, and when that ran out, I pulled out some coloured paper to jazz it up a bit:

 The tutorial for these baskets can be found here.

 I have lots more projects in progress or that I want to get started on - watch this space! 

-Linda