Sorting & Thrifting

Yesterday I spent ALL day filing and paying bills online eughh! Of course I had to get a bit of 'craft' in there somwhere so I stamped some files and put everything away in the hope that the cute files will now encourage me to keep up with my filing. I live in hope!

I also went through my humongous magazine collection. The ones I wanted to keep are now all filed away in magazine files with these cute labels I got on a free cd from Ideal Homes Magazine.



The ones that I didn't necessarily want to keep I went through and cut out what I did want to keep.


So here you go ladies (and guys, are there any reading my blog?) thrifty things you can do with your old magazines before recycling them:

1. Tear out and keep the recipes - saves on buying a recipe book.
2. Take out the free samples of creams and keep in your handbag - very handy to use in place of hand cream when you are out and about. The shampoos and shower gels are perfect for when you go swimming, saves on bringing bulky bottles.
3. For card makers cut out and keep shapes such as dresses, jeans, bottles etc and use them as templates for your cards.
4. For home makers - cut out and keep photos and contact details of kitchens, sitting rooms etc that you like.
   
5. For gardners - cut out and keep photos and contact details of gardens and flowers that you like. (see my mood board here)
   
6. For craftaholics - cut out and keep photos of things you would like to make and/or photos that inspire you and keep them in a scrap book. Pictures of mine to follow shortly.

Now I don't feel so bad about spending an average of 6 euro on magazines :o)

So more organising. How about this fab idea for storing your cards ...



It's a cooling rack that I tied to the inside door of the wardrobe in my craft room.

I FINALLY finished sorting that wardrobe by the way. It started like this this ...



and now looks like this ...

Not too impressed with this photo as it looks a bit messy but believe me it's sooo much more organised. Before this I had my wool all over the place.

And the best thing of all, once it's closed you see nothing but this ...



I have to say doing all the above was quite tedious and I really had to force myself - especially with the filing eughhhh! However there were advantages aside from the fact that I now know where everything is and they are:

• I came across all my old diaries from the 90's so I spent a couple of hours dipping in and out of them which was fun.
• I found over 30 euros worth of Tesco vouchers so I'm going to go online in a mo and get some magazine subscriptions with them. (Thank you Lucy for this great tip!)
• I found a pile of lottery tickets and I won 9 euro on one of them.

The only disadvantage is that I now want to use all that wool to make yet more things that I just don't seem to have time to do. That's a good complaint though.