I live in the country. We have wide-open spaces and gorgeous sunsets, but we do not have curbside recycling.

I’ve taken a long time to decide to recycle. Well, that’s not entirely true. I like to re-purpose and re-use things in my home, and I’ve always believed in the concept of being a ‘wise steward’ of my resources. By no means am I a ‘greenie’. I just like the idea of using things efficiently. I’ve been re-using the blank back-side of documents as scrap-paper for years. Ahem. Back to my story. So, I haven’t done much recycling because:

A. I have no curbside pickup.
B. I haven’t been sure if/where there are drop off facilities in my locality.
C. I don’t really have room: we have no garage, and the house is pretty much full.

After a conversation with a friend who has basically eliminated her garbage pick-up bill by hauling recyclables to the appropriate place in town (now I know where to take stuff!), I began tossing the idea of jumping on the recycling bandwagon. I tossed and tossed and kept coming up with problem C. No room in my house. And then, I found these lovely baskets…and reorganized my pantry. And now I’m doing it. Well, I’m accumulating the clean stuff I’m willing to let sit in my pantry until drop-off day. Which is better than nothing. And I’m kind of having fun smashing all those soda cans. It’s a good stress reliever.

All this to say, I reorganized my pantry last week. And I like how it looks, even though I wish it looked like this pantry. But hey, there’s always next time!

Onward and upward,
Audrey

I have a tiny bathroom, so I hang my boy’s towels on his door. But towels don’t always behave the way I want: they slip off the hooks from time to time, and I don’t like to pick them up!

In fact, I’m tired of picking them up. So these towels and I had a little date with my sewing machine.

And now we’ve come to an amicable agreement:

Have a beautiful weekend!
Audrey

I was in dire need of a good way to visually store my ribbon stash, and when I saw this storage idea in a recent issue of Creating Keepsakes, I knew I’d found it!

Additional shelving…a girl can never have enough!

Poor Miss J…she is my “Mini-Me”. Which means that she needs to know what to expect every day, to be able to mentally map out her day ahead of time. We can be flexible, us silly girls, but we like to know what’s coming up. Besides that, we need to do what we can to avoid as much of the ‘summer slide‘ as possible, because these are the kinds of things wierdos like me worry about.

Last night, she and I sat down and talked about the tasks she needs to accomplish each day (once they’re done, the day is ALL HERS!). She picked out some colorful paper, and I put this daily schedule together for her. We shall see if it’s helpful!

Start with a box…any square/rectangular box will do.

Measure the bottom and sides of your box. My boxes are about 10.5″ by 10.5″ on the bottom, and each side measured 11″ by 11″.

I wanted the liner to cover the inside AND outside of the box, so I determined the measurements of my cut pieces using this formula:

Base/bottom: add 1/2″ to each side to allow for 1/4″ seam allowances, so my cut piece measured 11″ by 11″.
Sides: (inside length + outside length +1/2″ for seam allowances) x (width + 1/2″ for seam allowances), so my 4 cut pieces each measured 11″ by 22.5″.

Sew the sides together. I used my serger, but a straight stitch machine will work just fine.

With all four pieces joined together, sew the two open sides to each other, forming a big tube.

Sew the base to one end of the “tube”.

Check to make sure it fits!

I decided to decorate these boxes with more fabric, and wanted a slightly rustic look, so I serged the edges of 6″ strips of toile with my trusty black thread:

And in true Nester-fashion, I hot-glued the trim right on to the liners. Voila!

So, one of the niggly finishing touches that just hasn’t hit the top of the list in the past decade has been my unfinished pantry shelving. I’m almost embarrassed to post this photo, but it’s hard to appreciate the finished project without seeing the before:

Shudder. Now you’ve seen the reality that was my pantry, we’ll move on to the inspiration. I’ve had the pantry re-do on my weekly list for several months, just kept moving it to next week…and next week…and next week (I love Outlook–makes it so easy to move things to next week!), until a month or so ago I really looked at the task and decided to take a little time and think about what I’d need to actually DO the job. Baskets! Cute ones! Because if I’m going to re-do the closet, I want it to look pretty for at least the first week. Here’s what I found:

A stack of these wire grocer’s baskets sat in my bedroom for several weeks more while I moved that job to next week…you get the drill…and then last week I finally decided it was time to get the job done. I hauled everything out, slapped several coats of white paint on every surface (I thought about doing some fun color, but decided it’s a PANTRY, and I want bright and clean), had panic attacks every time I walked through the messy kitchen, and then finally, at long last, my closet looks like this:

Sigh. Much better. Now I’m going to take a nap.