January | 2013 | cocoa and crafts

I went on a bit of a manic organizing spree during my days off between Christmas and New Year’s. I emptied and re-organized all my kitchen cupboards and my linen closet. And both make me smile now whenever I open them, yes I’m an organizing dork.

I also happen to be a gift wrapping dork. I love wrapping presents but all my wrapping supplies were shoved in a bag at the top of my linen closet so it always seemed like a chore to get the stuff down – that and I never knew what I had. So I decided to take that out of the linen closet to free up some space and finally get my wrapping supplies organized in the guest/craft room closet. The problem was… what to organize it in. Of course I turned to Pinterest for inspiration 🙂 And it finally clicked… magazine racks mounted to the sidewall of the closet! I finally found the perfect ones – they are clear acrylic and about 3 inches deep. Once I found those it was time to dig in…

Yup, all that was crammed onto the top shelf of the linen closet. And stuffed into a few other nooks and crannies – it was definitely more than I thought I had.

First up – sorting and organizing the paper, tissue, bags and fabric… (yikes that’s a lot)

Next up, the ribbon, gift tags and other embellishments.

I started by corralling the wrapping paper at the bottom.

Then I hung and filled all the magazine racks (these make me really happy).

And finally the ribbon went on the shelf along with boxes of neatly organized small boxes, ribbons and gift tags.
I found the boxes in Vancouver this weekend and a very dangerous store full of fun things to organize with (we spent an hour in there and it wasn’t very big…)

The best part about my new set-up is that it’s using that side wall in my closet, so except for some of the space on the top shelf I didn’t need to use any part of the closet that was already being utilized. Gift wrap on display and a new storage nook made this a very fun project.

Finally… it’s time to get the Christmas presents posted. The excuse of having to wait until the gifts have been opened is long gone…

This year, a friend of mine started talking about making felt food for her nephews and of course I got roped in. A few hours on Pinterest and Etsy and I was hooked – it was going to be a felt food feast for Christmas. I got the patterns and the felt and then… my partner in felt was on to new projects. Luckily my mom was in town early on and helped me get far enough into the project that I was too excited about cute little veggies to turn back. So hours of tracing, cutting, gluing and hand-stitching tiny pieces of felt were about to begin.

I did a lot of looking for various patterns, but settled on a couple from Sweet Emma Jean. They looked more complicated, but also much cuter and more realistic than most of the others, and I was too intrigued by a pizza cutter than actually spins so I had to give them a try. The food was much more intricate than I’d expected – onions and peppers – 3 pieces of felt for each little slice. The pizza cutter… I lost count, but I think it was about 17 pieces (and it really does spin!). The pizza itself… what’s 13 times 6? And then of course the tortillas and pasta were the easiest and maybe the most fun of all. But all together, it’s one fun feast of felt food! (and I’m sure there will be more to come…. can’t have dinner without dessert after all).