Showing Off Your Stuff

Unless you lived in a catalogue, you would not ordinarily think of displaying the contents of your linen closet. But the owner of this Maine cottage had a different idea.

Her tiny closet lacked doors, so she put her resources into colorful baskets that compliment her towels and - voila! - her closet is a work of art.

Vacation Home Straightening

This vacation home on the coast of Maine has hosted generations of the same family and has enough dinnerware to serve dozens. As you can see, the shelves are overflowing. There was no rhyme or reason to what each one held. Gorgeous blue and white china was scattered throughout all the shelves

Because the home is jointly owned by several family members, I was not allowed to toss anything so I simply follwed the  "like with like" rule to clean it up.  See how pleasing it looks with the blue and white china clustered into a focal point on the top shelf? Total straightening time: 40 minutes.

rePURPOSING Things: Gold Jewelry

Some inherited jewelry is gorgeous; you may have coveted it for years. Others you would not be caught dead wearing. You can keep the memory of the giver alive by rePURPOSING what you won't wear into a new piece of jewelry you will wear.

This thick gold bangle bracelet was made from a set of thin, dented ones. It gets lots of compliments and the wearer can tell the story of how it come into being.

The Hanger Trick

The hanger trick is not original but it is so wonderful I want everyone to know about. It is so cool that I hope it inspires you to clean out your clothes closets right now!

After you remove everything from your closet and decide what clothes you want to keep, hang them back in the closet the "wrong"way, with the hanger hook facing forward. When you return something to the closet after you have worn it hang it in the "right" way, with the hook facing the back of the closet.

At the end of the season it is easy to see which clothes to discard - the ones with the wrong way hangers, the ones that had never been worn.

If you want to gain some extra hanging space, try this with your coat closet. Coats are bulky and take up a lot of room and you'll get some space by removing just two. But I am a little more lenient when it comes to discarding coats. They tend to be expensive and you don't want to make a mistake tossing a fabulous raincoat you didn't wear one year because it rained less than the year before.  So I have a longer time line for coats: the ones on backwards hooks at the end of the second winter get donated.

Kid's Art Gallery and Storage

We want our kids to be creative and proudly display their art work but we may not want it to take over the house. Sometimes sheer quantities turn their art into visual clutter.  And then there is the issue of what to do with each masterpiece when it time to replace or remove it.  It's hard to throw out the first dinosaur drawing they ever did.

Inexpensive acrylic box frames are your answer ($3.99 at Target). Just pop new art into the acrylic display box and rotate the older piece out, storing it inside the paperboard box support. So simple even your child could it. Now you have a neat little family art gallery.

rePURPOSING Things:Grandmother's Hankies Part II

The quilts on the last post took lots of hankies to make. Here is an idea if you only have a few - baby quilts!

rePURPOSING Things: Grandmother's Hankies

Cleaning out a parent's possessions to move them to assisted living or to close up house after they have died is very painful and exhausting. There are so many of their memories, and some of yours, tied up in every little item.

Here is how I transformed a surprise discovery at the bottom of my mother's dresser to a family heirloom on my daughter's bed.

When I was packing up mom's things I found dozens of hankies with goodbye notes neatly folded and preserved under her lingerie. Apparently when my parents moved in the 40's my mother's friends gave her a hanky party.  She had carefully saved them for 60 years!

I unwrapped,  laundered, and ironed each one.  Then I sewed them into a queen size quilts for my two daughters.

The older daughter got the fun, colorful ones in her quilt.

And the younger daughter got the sweet white ones with little flowers embroidered in the corners.

This labor of love linked our generations and warmed my daughters with memories of their grandma.