Monday, December 25, 2017

Friday, December 22, 2017

How to Keep Your Craft Station Organized

Christmas is officially THREE days away! I am surprisingly stress free because my husband and I got pretty much everything done nice and early this year (thank you Amazon Prime!). Since I'm hoping to be getting some new goodies for my craft room for Christmas I have started to attempt to clean, organize and purge in preparation. Today I'm bringing you some tips and trick for how to keep your craft station organized!


How to keep your craft station organized 

If you are a crafty person and you like everything from embroidering and sewing to DIY decorating projects done from scratch, you are probably spending quite a lot of time on your craft station. This holy place for you must be quite crowded and cluttered. If you are feeling like making some change and take things under control, there are a few things which can help you to keep your craft station well-organized.
A Beautiful Mess

Start with cleaning
The first and most important part of the organization is throwing away all the things which you don’t need. Pull everything out and take a good look around. I am sure that there are some materials which you will never use but you will need to clean and some of your supplies must be quite old and probably unusable. If you have a certain style of work and you use only certain materials, you might want to throw away all the fabrics you have kept just because. 
Get rid of all the dried-up paints and markers which may need to be cleaned later and slow you down.
The Crafted Life
Make a plan
If you like to experiment in different styles and craft, you can make a plan to separate the material depending on their purpose. Put all the papers, washi tapes, ribbons and stickers to one side of the station and store all the fabrics, pins and sewing threads to the other. This way you can always easily find the items you need, according to the project you are working on.
Best Friends For Frosting
Use everyday objects for storage
As a true crafty person, you can make a storage place out of things you can easily find around your home. Jars are very helpful to store pens, brushes, scissors. Bigger plastic boxes can store other items you need to put away. Putting stickers or labels on the boxes can make the access to your crafting instruments much easier. If you don’t mind working on another DIY project which can help you with the organization of your craft station, you can cut a PVC pipe into a few smaller couplings and glue them together. You can store your paints there and if you put them with the bottoms up, you can easily see what colour of paint you are grabbing every time.
A Beautiful Mess
Assign a place for every object
One of the best way to make sure that your craft station is always well-organized is to keep everything at a certain place. Adopt the habit of assigning a specific place for the items you use in your projects. This can assure that you will never loose your crafting instruments and you will be able to access them easily.
The Crafted Sparrow
Organize by color 
If you want to be able to find everything you need easily and make your crafting space look fun and colourful, you can organize your tools by colours. This method is both practical and fun at the same time. Forget about the struggle to find that particular ribbon or washi tape that you want to use for your new project. This colour-coordinated method can solve your problems. Even if you keep your items in drawers or boxes, you can put colourful stickers to be aware of the colours of the tools inside them.
Polished Habitat
The organizing of your craft station might take some time and effort but if you use these tricks, you can make the process much easier and enjoyable. Once your station is well-organized, you will be able to enjoy a clean and cozy place for work. If you keep the order in your crafting space, you will always be able to concentrate on your projects and forget worrying about the mess around you.




This was a guest post from Nicole. Nicole currently resides in London with her family. She is a co-owner of a small cleaning company and enjoys reading and writing.

For more craft room/office inspiration be sure to check out my pinterest board!

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

DIY Hanukkah Menorah

Happy first day of Hanukkah!!
As I'm sure you know by now, I'm adopted. So last year for Christmas my mom got a 23andMe DNA kit for both my husband and myself. I eagerly awaited the results and when I finally received them, some of the results were as I had suspected (like the British & Irish... thank God, because I have a shamrock tatoo! Haha.), but some were definitely a surprise.  
Learn your ancestry with 23 and me!
I would have never guessed I'd have so much Ashkenazi Jewish or Native American in me. In fact, in my self reported information I actually said I definitely WASN'T Jewish... apparently I was wrong! While these results are obviously guesstimations essentially it really got me thinking. My results stated "You most likely had a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent who was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish. This person was likely born between 1900 and 1960." Having learned this, I started reading up on Judaism. While I know that having Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and Judaism as a religion are different things, I decided I wanted to attempt to incorporate some Hanukkah traditions this year. First up, I wanted to DIY a Menorah!
Create your own DIY Menorah!
Lucky for me, my husband is a lumber salesman, so we have plenty of scrap wood laying around. I was able to create this project using all items I already had! I really liked this menorah that I found (a Martha Stewart project of course) so I used it as my inspiration. 

Supplies

Wood (We used a scrap piece of 1x2 pine and a scrap piece of 2x2 pine)
Drill

I started the project by hunting down some Hanukkah candles. I started at my local party store. They had a Hanukkah endcap with cheesy plates and napkins and decor, but no candles. I started thinking finding some may not be an easy task. But, I made a stop to my local Home Goods and not only did I find Hanukkah candles, I found these cute ones! 

Once I had the candles we were able to figure out what size drill we needed to create the holes for them. I left this part to my husband (mostly because he's better at math and I wanted all of the holes to be just right). Once the holes were drilled we glued the center piece (for the shamash) and let it dry. 

Then it was time for the fun part, designing my sentiment. Using Cricut Design Space and one of my favorite fonts, I created this. 
Create your own DIY Menorah!
One of my design secrets is, that I usually add the item that I'll be decorating so I can really visualize the final product. In this case it was a piece of wood that was 1.5" x 14", so that's what the cream rectangle represents. 
Once I was happy with my design, I cut it and weeded it using my BrightPad. This was my first time attempting to use iron on with wood so I was a little nervous but, with the help of my EasyPress, it worked like a charm! I'd say it worked even better than on actual fabric! When it was done the carrier sheet even slid off like how it does when you put on a temporary tattoo! Haha. Weird comparison? Maybe. But you know what i mean. 
I ended up adding some gold glitter to the shamash piece as well (and I just cut that with my paper trimmer since it was an easy rectangle). And viola! I have my very own DIY'd Menorah for my very first Hanukkah! I'm so excited to burn it tonight!
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