Crafty Monday: Art Room Organizers

Good Monday morning! I try to stay cheerful about Mondays. They get a bad rap most of the time. But I always believe that without Mondays, we would not have the rest of the week to look forward to! Since we do have a Monday, and we show you some pretty cool crafty stuff on Mondays, let's say happy Monday and start on our Crafty Monday project.

Collaged Storage Box 

Along with trying to expand a tiny closet in our bedroom, we're also trying to refurbish a sunroom at the front of the house that is the kids' playroom. They have toys everywhere in there, and I still haven't come up with good storage solutions for all of the toys. It is also exposed to everything because we have giant windows (non-insulated mind you. What WERE they thinking?) and it faces the front of the house. While the geography of the sunroom is completely wrong (faces North with a west and east sidelong glance, should face south) there are a few things we can do with it. Mainly, I've been wanting to change it into an art room capable of doing double duty as a playroom. Art and play go together in my mind!

Right now my kids don't have a centralized place to express their creativity. We use the dining room table, the coffee table, floors, and whatever other space they can find. The same with the art supplies. They're in various places around the house and to actually do a project we have to hunt things down. So I've been organizing some thoughts on a Pinterest board for this project and came across one the other day that was simple, fun, and with a few tweaks could prove awesome.

Follow Freckle Dots (Tammy Lyons)'s board Building a craft room on Pinterest.

Of course, we're going to put up some curtains in this room, which I'll probably hand paint because I'm totally hooked and hubby bought me paints and brushes for Valentine's Day. But we also need storage in there.



This simple organizer was made using paper towel tubes and a shoe box. Her shoe box was very pretty on its own, but I didn't actually have a shoe box available. I had a juice drink box. I also didn't have very many paper towel or t.p. rolls because my husband found my stash and they hit the trash bin. (Bad husband. Bad.) Still, we were having an "ice day" here in the south, the power was out, and the kids were bouncing off the walls.

Supplies

I gathered up the box that I had and scrounged around for containers. I'm always saving back plastic containers of some sort. I also grabbed the Mod Podge, some brushes, old magazines, scrapbook paper, an old calendar, fabric scraps and the kids.

Scrap Supplies

I had to make my box work a little better for our purposes. It had a rather large hole in the bottom of it where the flaps came together. To "fix" it all I did was cut off the top flaps with a box cutter and fill in the hole with one of the flaps. I hot glued it down and I had a sealed bottom.

box

flaps cut off

flap that fit

glued that sucker in there

Scrapbook paper went on first

More collage

And more

And more

Collaged container with fabric, magazine pictures, etc. 

Collaged container

Beginnings of the organizer! 

We spent the afternoon cutting, pasting, collaging, and having a great time. In the end, we had a very unique pen/pencil/marking utensil organizer. We didn't do anything extravagant, but it was fun and we expanded on an idea that someone else had. You could decorate your box with all kinds of great things, even just plain fabric and paints. Hot glue or white glue could be used in place of Mod Podge. It's an awesome way to recycle and create a piece of art - for art.