Friday, November 11, 2011

Red Letter (Sorting) Day

If I never see another cardboard box in my life, it will be too soon.  I suppose it's too bad then that our "dining room" is overrun with empty, flattened cardboard boxes. Yesterday I took the opportunity to make lemonade out of these cardboard lemons, and made a really awesome mail sorter for our new, still disastrously unpacked home.  (It's called avoidance crafting.)

The best thing is that, due to my overabundance of craft supplies, I didn't have to buy one single thing for this.  I had everything on hand.  I rock like that.

A few weeks ago I saw this mail organizer tutorial from Choose to Thrive and stored it in my little crafty brain under "things to do with a cardboard box."


Given our current space challenges, and the fact that we needed an efficient mail sorting system, I decided to give it a whirl.  The project template and size were too large for the space that I had available, so I used the basic project idea and decided to wing it. 

First, I needed a cardboard box.  Thankfully, I had one (or 3,000).  I won't give you a play-by-play, but suffice it to say that over several hours, a cardboard box went from this:


To this:



It's not perfect because I didn't follow the old adage to measure twice and cut once.  As a crafter, I tend to be really impatient and therefore very tolerant of imperfections. Things will be crooked--so what? I made it out of cardboard, so I can't really expect much.

I covered it in fabric that I had laying around, added a few labels, a bow, and voila!  Organizer:


For being made of cardboard, I think it works pretty well. Doesn't look too shabby either.  All in all, a success!

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