some fun for me

UGH!!

I'm going to re-do my office/craftroom and this is definitely the place to start.  For the past ten years, I've "filed" my photos by throwing them into a couple of boxes.  They're in date order (sort of) and I've kept my kids' school and activity portraits separate from our family photos.  Actually, this isn't ten years of family photos;  this is about four years of family photos.  The family photos I've taken for the last ten years are either on my flash drive or still on the memory cards in our cameras. 

I started off by sorting the school projects, certificates and other memorabilia and filed them for each child.

 

 Then, I got the the school and activity portraits organized and safely house in a filing drawer.

More boxes and mini files used, to organize for future scrapbooking.  Much less overwhelming than the huge, chaotic file boxes, and I can actually imagine working on those scrapbooks.

The next step will be cutting up all those wallet photos (2002 to present!) and passing them along to our families.  Work-In-Progress is an understatement. 

W-I-P Wednesday

There have been a lot of starts and stops, in my blogging journey.  After a four-month hiatus, I committed to the Blogtoberfest Challenge.  The challenge was to post daily during the month of October.  I did pretty well for the first half of the month.  Then, over-scheduling and illness took over and posts have been spotty ever since.  A new strategy is needed.

Since my life seems to be a Work-In-Progress (and whose isn't?), I am going to try to share an unfinished project and post the progress. 

In preparation for holiday gifts, I have taken apart some of the jeans my kids have outgrown, to recycle the legs into gift bags for bottles of wine.  After cutting off the leg portion, I googled jeans upcycling ideas, to use the pockets, zippers and extra denim.  I came across a great tutorial for a pouch to house some of our smaller electronics (phone, iPod, portable gaming devices, ear buds, etc).  Check it out at http://www.instructables.com/id/Protect-the-Tech/?ALLSTEPS 

I made a couple of pouches using the jeans leftovers, the zipper from the jeans and the zipper from a fleece jacket, an unused shoelace and an elastic scrap dyed using t-shirt tie-dye (the elastic is on the open-top pocket, instead of sewing on velcro).  I think they're kind of cute.



I thought that my daughter would want the top one, with the cute embroidery.  But, she found the zipper to be too small.  She took the larger one and packed most of the items from her purse.

Below is another pouch I'm working on.  I liked the rhinestones on the pockets and the buttoned flap.  I'm going to try to also use the coin pocket and another zippered pocket from a fleece jacket.



Maybe the finished pouch can be mine.  :)  I'm hoping to have it finished by the weekend.

I'm very intrigued by the idea of upcycling.  There are so many of these projects featured on Pinterest and tutorials on Google.  Let me know which ones you have tried and liked.

W-I-P Wednesday

 

I'm adding fabric flowers to my melted crayon "art", using the scraps from my daughter's embroidery/patchwork project.  I followed Jessi's directions at http://practicallyfunctional.net/2012/06/fun-fabric-flowers/ and they are super easy to understand and execute. 

I'm not sure how many flowers to make.  I'm using all from that batch of scraps. Will that be enough?   How do you know when you have enough?