You always hear about spring cleaning, but for me the cleaning bug always seems to hit mid-winter.  I think it’s because when the weather is nice we’re not spending much time inside, but now that it’s cold and icy/slushy/snowy outside we’re inside most of the time and the clutter has more opportunity to make me crazy enough to actually do something about it!

My first order of business was to organize Ashlyn’s craft stuff better.  I had it all in 2 plastic totes on top of our pantry and it wasn’t working at all: things didn’t fit, the boxes were heavy and hard for me to get down, and everything got lost inside.  I had a storage unit that I used to use for scrapbooking that was free, so I brought it into the kitchen.

All of the things I don’t want her to have free reign over are in the box (paints and play dough, mostly) and everything else is sorted by drawer: crayons, stickers, colouring books (2 drawers), paper (2 drawers), paint with water books, random craft stuff like pompoms and googly eyes, her beads (we like to sort them by colour in mini-muffin tins, or string them on pipe cleaners to make headbands or necklaces), and then her smock and paint trays (re-purposed dollar store ice cube trays).

A far bigger project has been my scrapbook desk in the basement!  Jordan picked up the storage cubes (there are 6 of them) at Michaels, then built a desktop over them.  The bookcase is Ikea, we have at least 4 of them in various places in our home!

I cannot wait to get scrapping and use my brand new Cricut!  I have all of my papers sorted and I even went through all of my scraps to sort them – that was interesting.  Not sure what I was thinking keeping some of those teeny pieces of paper.

I feel so much better having a better organized kitchen and craft area.  My next project will be tackling that mess of a bookcase on the right!

I am constantly putting up new pictures in our home, and I love ‘themed’ picture frames – seasons, holidays, you name it and I want it.  The problem is that they can be really expensive, and where do you store all of the Santa/Christmas/Easter/Valentine’s Day/Halloween/etc frames for 50 or so weeks a year you don’t have them on display?  Not to mention that I never know if the picture that I’m going to want to display will be landscape or portrait!

I decided to get a teeny bit crafty and use some scrapbook papers to change up a simple frame that I found at Michaels (on sale, of course).  The frame is 8×10 so I can use it with 4×6 or 5×7 pictures and still have some of the paper showing.  For their Santa picture, I picked out some die-cut snowflake paper.

While I had intended to use the snowflake frame for the rest of the winter, when I saw this damask paper I had to take it home!  It’s actually a transparency, not die-cut.

(picture in the frame taken by Elizabeth Fulton Photography – I apologize for the colouring on my picture but I was having a heck of a time getting the white balance right and the flash was making the pattern look crazy so this was the best I could do)

I’ve started a file to keep the papers that aren’t being used in; this way I can keep them to reuse whenever I get the whim.  I may even try adding coloured paper behind the die-cuts or transparencies to mix things up a bit.  Cheap, easy, and immediately gratifying – just how I like my crafts!