Repurposed Craft Organizer

just about the opposite of my room - image credit

If you are the kind of crafter like I am, your craft room/space is terribly disorganized. I would love to have fancy and attractive organizers for all my things, but the budget just doesn't allow for that. So I have plastic totes and a couple plastic bins with drawers. I also have old plastic shoe boxes and cardboard boxes. But nothing special.


But I have found a solution to my problem. Sara at Prayer and Coupons was having the same problem so put together an awesome craft organizer out of cardboard boxes and a wooden dowel! Not only does this reuse what would otherwise be thrown away (or recycled, though still wasting resources), but it cost virtually nothing!


So go check it out and get inspired - I know I was!

New Shirts From Old Shirts

The kid is growing so that only means one thing - he is in need of new clothes! I bought him some new shoes over the weekend and got a couple of shorts on cheap clearance at Target for him. But I couldn't find any shirts in his size that I was willing to spend the $$ they wanted for them. So instead I got busy making him some shirts. 

I don't do real patterns, my mind just doesn't work that way, so I always draft my own and put together whatever I am sewing how it makes sense in my head (which is why I am only a so-so seamstress and don't do anything extremely hard).

To draft your own pattern all you need is a current shirt that fits (or even is just a little small) and some kind of paper to trace it on (I use brown paper bags from the grocery store that I get when I forget my reusable bags). In case you aren't sure how to go about this Made has a tutorial showing you how...it is for a lap tee but the basic idea applies to any t-shirt and she even shows you how to make a pattern from a smaller shirt.

After I cut out the pieces I simply sewed them together the way a shirt should go together. Make sense? If not, maybe I'll get around to making a tutorial one day. If you're lucky ;)

There is nothing fancy about these shirts but they fit and are cute. But do you know what the best part is? They cost me absolutely nothing (other than the gas to drive to my mom's to use her sewing maching since mine is acting up again)! I used a couple of old t-shirts of mine to make the blue and grey one and a polo that the husband didn't like the collar on to make the other one. This is what we call repurposing and upcycling.

I really like using old shirts to make shirts for the kid because 1) it saves me money,  2) it gives new life to something that would have otherwise been thrown out, and 3) I cut it out so I can use the shirt's existing hems. I hate hemming! 

If you have any kind of sewing skills,  you could whip one of these up in no time!