Too Crafty for my Own Good :)

Now that the holidays are over, I can share with you one of the things that I did for a Christmas gift to my sister and her husband AND a new pen caddy that I made for my craft room work table.

For ten years I sold Longaberger Baskets & Pottery, so needless to say, I have quite a stockpile of products from my time as a consultant.  Most I use either functionally or in our home décor, but once in a while I'll part with one as a gift to someone.

The basket was another version of the magazine basket.  The difference is this basket sits on legs and has a wooden lid with a toggle clasp.   For many years, I used it to store magazines and or articles from magazines in it, but I had cleaned it out a couple years ago and it had just been sitting in our spare bedroom unused.  I had also somehow got acrylic paint on the lid that marred it a bit.

I decided to give the basket filled with goodies to my sister and brother-in-law for Christmas.  I came up with the brilliant idea to paint the wooden lid with chalkboard paint.  Chalkboard paint is very on trend right now and after I took the plunge, I was so glad I did!

 

I taped off the leather hinges before painting and it did take two coats of chalkboard paint to get a nice coverage and I did both sides of the lid.

 

The finishing touch was writing "Stuff" in chalk on the lid and then it was filled with the other goodies we had bought for them.

The other DIY project I worked on was a pen caddy.  I needed to figure out a way to corral all of the pens, pencils, markers, etc. that I have on my craft room work table.  Not only because I have so many of them, but so I could "see" them too.  I had been collecting bath tissue rolls for another project when I came up with the idea of using them for a pen caddy.

As you can see, I have a LOT of pens and that doesn't even include the Copics and more Stablio pens in their own storage containers.

 

The basket in the below picture on the left is is the basket I decided to re-purpose as a pen caddy for my craft room.  Funny story about this basket; I don't even remember where I got it, but it's been around for a long time and has literally been used in almost every room in our house for some function or another.  Now it's got a permanent home in my craft room. 

 

The first thing I did as you can see in the photo below was to cut a piece of chipboard the dimensions of the bottom of the basket.

Next thing I did was round up the number of bath tissue rolls I was going to need to fill the basket.  In my case, I needed 12 tissue rolls.

 

Since I would see the front three tissue rolls, I went to my scrapbook paper stash and found a patterned paper to cover the three tissue rolls in the front.

Once the front three rolls were covered, I hot glued them to the piece of chipboard I cut for the bottom of the basket.

 

Once all of the tissue rolls were hot glued to the bottom chip board base, I placed the whole thing into the basket.



All that was left to do was fill up the various tissue rolls with my pens and markers.  Pens are really suppose to be stored horizontally, but I have so many that I could never use all of them in a lifetime so I don't worry about it too much and my pens and markers seem to be fine.

 

I was also able to tuck a few other tools in the side of the caddy for easy access and another benefit is that it is very light and portable.

I've also been busy around the house since the new year and have some fun things to share and some really good recipes that I've discovered.

Thanks for stopping by.......later!