Welcome to the Disaster

...or, as I call it, my bedroom. There are no before pictures, because I don't think anyone wants to see them.

First up, handling the shoes that had been starting to spill off the edges of my shoe racks. Solution? Pretty-ify a shoe box and stick it to the wall, stuff flats in. Hopefully I'll find a sturdier solution later, but for now, I'm not handling an avalanche of shoes.

Then, handling jewelry for each day (since I'm, y'know, trying to wear it). I tacked an old jewelry box to the wall (jee, I like these things...) to dump it in.

My next task included cleaning the area around and under my couch and work table, during which I rediscovered several magazines and an old binder taken from the trash at my mom's old job (who throws out a perfectly good enormous binder like this?? WHO?). Rediscovering old drawings of mine was fun, but the slightly over-sized untouched paper within sparked the idea of gluing on pictures of inspiration to me. From those magazines, of course. (I also discovered my new long-haired favorite. Jane Seymour is amazingly gorgeous!)

 

And some weird folding produced a paper clutch-thing? I have NO clue what to do with it. But I did glue a lock shaped button onto it. I'll...figure something out.

And more things're going to get finished up too, soon. ;)

DIY: Ribbon-bordered whiteboard

In the process of making my room fit for human habitation cleaning, I came across this little white board, buried under a few binders (math and english, to be specific). The rubber border around it had made it fall off the hooks it was attached to, because they made it too heavy. The cardboard backing didn't help either. And...it's kinda ugly too, to be honest. So I thought, Hey, I have a ton of ribbon...it might be kinda cool to put a lighter border on this so I can actually use it and have it stay put... So I did. And even if your whiteboard/dry erase board isn't having problems staying up, it's kind of a cute idea. (And yes, I did add some stuff to the plain white parts of the image - if you click on it, you can see that quite clearly).

1. Punch some holes in that sucker! Two is best for tying, of course, and with the width of the board, it also works with a holepunch.
2. To create this, I used a little bit of blue yarn from this skein, three feet of this green ribbon, tacky glue, and scissors.
3. Measure and cut into four pieces. Yes, one will be shorter than the others. It's kind of necessary, actually, so it can work with the holes.
4. See? All snipped up.
5. If you haven't already, if it's dirty, clean that sucker up. Mine hates the marker that came with (note to self, start using actual expos...), and I didn't have any dry erase spray, so I just wiped it off with Windex. I think it may be cleaner than it was when I bought it, actually.
6. Cut off a little bit of the yarn, and tie both ends through the holes. And that little tiny leftover piece? Tie it up and up as far as you can, then clip off the ends still sticking out.
7. Glue the first piece down to one side with tacky glue. Be pretty careful.
8. Then the second. And the third.
9. Put the first in between your two holes. Measure the length between the actual holes, than, from one end of the piece of ribbon, check it, then cut where that ends.
10. You should have two pieces now. Glue the bigger in between the two holes.
11. Measure the remaining pieces to be covered, then check that on the remaining piece of ribbon. In my case, it was equal to two squares each of the ribbon, so I snipped it in half. And then glue.
12. Okay, the board has rounded edges, but the ribbon does not. Fix that by snipping them to a rounded shape.
13. Hang, and enjoy the new looking whiteboard.

I really like it now. =D Glad I had that ribbon laying around. I used to use it as a headband, but ribbon headbands are terrible to try keeping on. I also have a ton of yarn, including that skein, on rulers, that I got from a workshop on textiles.