Recently Martha posted a tutorial for making a jewelry holder out of a shadow box.  I had been wanting to do something similar, but I haven’t been able to find a shadow box that was the right dimensions—even Martha’s wasn’t really long enough.  I need a place to store a few key long necklaces that keep getting tangled in my regular jewelry box.

I found a great picture frame at IKEA that was kind of long and skinny, and I thought it would work great for a necklace holder.  So I bought it and got to work!

Here’s what you’ll need for this project:

• picture frame, preferable a long and skinny one (mine was 9″ x 20″)
• fabric of your choice, enough to cover the back of the frame
• quilt batting
• staple gun with 1/4″ staples
• screw hooks
• hammer
• scrap nail (for starting screw holes)
• three pieces of balsa wood in 1/8″ thick by 1/2″ wide
• glue gun
• small nails

I know, it kind of sounds like a lot of materials.

To start, take your frame apart.  You won’t need the glass or the matting (if your frame comes with it).  I started by putting the hooks into the frame.  I wanted 5 hooks, so I measured it out so that they were spaced equally.

Then I screwed each hook into the inside of the frame.  I started each hole by hammering a nail about 1/4″ into the frame, then removing it, so that I had a little hole started in which to screw the hook.

You don’t have to screw the hook all the way in, since the base of it is hidden by the lip of the frame.  I was worried that it would screw through and out the top, so I just put it in far enough so that the threads still above the wood were hidden by the lip of the frame.  I did that all the way across so that I had my five hooks ready to go.

Next is the trickiest part.  You need to build out your frame a little.  Eseentially, you want to add a lip of wood around the frame that the back can rest on.  Since these hooks will prevent the back from resting flush on the frame as it would if you had a picture in there, you need to add something for the back to rest on on the other three sides.

I used balsa wood, which is super easy to work with.  I found mine at a hobby shop.  I realize that this material is a little obscure… you could probably also just use some screws, as long as you screw them in at the right distance from the edge.

I measured exactly how far from the lip of the frame the back would sit by placing it in and pressing it up against the hooks.  I marked it and measured it and realized the hooks were making the back sit 1/2″ away from the lip of the frame.  That meant I needed 1/2″ balsa wood to build up the frame.  I cut it to size so that the two long sides and the bottom of the frame got little wood boosters.  I just added a little bit of hot glue to the back of the wood to attach it to the frame.

You can see here how the wood creates a little ledge for the backing to sit on:

Now the frame is ready, and it’s time to make the backing.  I wanted mine to be kind of soft and smushy, and fabric-covered.  I used two layers of quilt batting to make it smushy, and then I covered it with a nice fabric.

It’s easier to cut the unwieldy batting if you place the frame backing on top of it to hold it down.

Once you’ve cut the batting, cut the fabric at least 2″ wider on all sides than your backing piece.  Then, it’s time to staple gun it to the frame back.

The first side is easy; simply make sure your fabric is straight on the front.

Once you’ve added three or four staples spaced evenly apart on the top, you move to the opposite side.  Here, you want to pull the fabric relatively tight; since the batting is on the front, there’s a little bit of give, so don’t be afraid to pull it pretty taut.

After you have the bottom secured, you can staple the sides.  Pull those taut, too.

To finish off the corners, simply fold them under into a neat-ish triangle and staple, like this:

Sorry you can see my camera remote in this one!

The 1/4″ staples were the smallest I could find, and even these come through the front of the frame back board a little.  So, in order to make sure there aren’t any sharp points coming through the front, I run my fingers along the front side where I estimate the staples have come through.  Any time I feel anything remotely sharp, I hammer it down gingerly.

Here’s the backing when it’s all stapled and hammered out:

Then you are ready to insert it in the frame.  Since the bendy frame holders (technical name, you know) will no longer hold the backing in, I removed them.  (Easy to do with pliers.)  But now I need a new way to hold the frame together.  I decided a few small nails would work well as replacement bendy frame holders.

So, I stuck the back in and put a nail right up against the backing.  I hammered it in just about 1/4″ or a little more.

I put one on the top and one on the bottom, and three spaced evenly on the sides.  That pretty much did the trick.

And, voila!  Here it is!

Not bad, eh?  I decided I wanted a few more hooks, though.  So I added one on each side of the frame and three across the bottom.

And then I hung it up in my room!  The frame came with hardware to hang it, which I used.

Thar she blows, hanging next to my window.  Then, I loaded it up with my jewelry.

You can see how I’ve got a couple of pieces there that are really quite long, so I really wanted a longer holder.

What do you think?  I’m fairly pleased with it myself.

Oh, c’mon, you know you have one.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been drowning in laundry.  Both the kids’ hampers were overflowing for at least two weeks, and I was doing one or two loads of whatever we needed, but it was a constant state of “are there any clean socks” and “where’s his baseball uniform?”

So last weekend, just ahead of the alleged end of the world, I did all the laundry.  Six loads of it.  It took me two days, but I got it all done.  But it kind of sucked.

And here’s the thing: over the course of the two days I did laundry, more laundry piled up.  After I finished all those loads, I basically had enough dirty clothes for another load!  So I never really got the satisfaction of empty hampers.

This week, though, I’ve been doing the laundry as it comes in.  Every day, I’ll do a load or two.  The result is that we aren’t running out of anything, but the downside is that I’m always doing laundry, and the loads are a little smaller, so it’s a bit more of a drain on resources.

I thought I’d turn to you, my readers.  Do you have a laundry philosophy?  Do you wait til the hampers are full and have a laundry day?  Or do you try to keep ahead of it, doing laundry as it comes in?  Or do you do what I sometimes do, and wait until someone needs clean underwear and then run a load of necessities?

Take the poll and tell me what you find to be the pros and cons of your laundry method in the comments.  I’m trying to institute my own system and I need advice!

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Yesterday, I got a burst of energy and decided to tackle a task I’ve been needing to address:

Organizing the Tupperware cabinet.

I have to clean it out every few months.  As hard as I try, it never stays organized, and I’ve given up on killing myself to keep it that way.  It only takes about twenty or thirty minutes to fix it up, so I just take that on whenever it gets out of hand.

Here’s what it looked like this time:

Yesterday, I started to question my container-organizing skills and started to wonder whether my system was really the best.

So, I’m asking you, dead readers (I LOVE calling y’all “dead readers”): how do you organize your Tupperware?

I’ve tried two different approaches, and I don’t know whether there are more, but now I don’t know which of the two is best.  I used to store the lids with each corresponding container, but that seemed to get disorganized faster.  So then, I bought myself some lid holder thingys at the Container Store, and now I store them all separate, lids together and containers together.

These are the lid holders, post-rearranging:

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When I was all done, I ended up with a plethora of extra lids and some extra containers.  How does this happen???  How can I lose containers without lids, or vice versa?  I don’t get it.  Here’s all my randoms that I ended up recycling:

Also, what do you call these dealies?  I always call them Tupperware, kind of like how I call tissues Kleenex.  But what do you call them?  Plastic containers?

I am full of questions for y’all today.

Please enlighten.  And have a lovely day.  Martha post coming next!