Hello Everybody!

Wow! I have been MIA these last few weeks.  We have been busy, busy around here.  Beryl, my daughter in law moved in with us until my son gets out of the Marine Corps in July. So I flew down to Arizona to help her make the 18 hour drive back.  She brought with her their two-year old puppy Levi.  Now he is a cutie and very sweet, but he is a puppy used to playing with big dogs.  Jazz on the other hand is 9 and used to being a very spoiled only child.  So, needless to say, he is a little put out by our new addition.  Poor baby LOL.  Here is Levi.

But on to my new storage solutions.  I was in need of some more storage- there is just too many cool things out there, I must have them all !!! sigh…anyway I saw on YouTube where you can make your own storage out of foam board, so I thought for a few bucks what is the worst that can happen?

So I started with an ink pad holder.  It was pretty easy though I will say it is very difficult to make all the cuts super even like they should be to fit together properly.  In the end, my wonderful husband re-cut my cuts with a table saw to make them line up and then it went together beautifully.  This is a super cheap project that works fabulously, but it does take time and patience. Please do not look to closely at the upper left corner LOL, oops!

To the right of the ink pad storage is a photo box that I bought at Michaels for $2.00 and I put foam board in it to make six cubbies for my paint daubers. It is not completely finished as I was short one piece of foam.

Next, feeling all kinds of proud of myself I decided I wanted to make something to hold all my copic refills.  So, I skipped the part where I make all the crooked cuts and went straight to my man to ask him to cut my sections with the table saw.  Happily he agreed and this project only took about 30 minutes.

Now I still had some foam board left over so I made three stencil boxes to hold my stencils.  I wanted them divided by size to make the stencils easier to find.  I definitely prefer to have them out and easy to get to when I am art journaling.  The boxes were a breeze.  I did use heating duct tape to make them so I covered that up with pretty washi tape.

I couldn’t be more pleased with how everything came out.  Unless you really look, you would think they are the same wood as the rest of my room.

Couple of tips if you want to make these.  The dollar store has foam board and I used it for the copic storage.  It is not quite as white as the board I got at Hobby Lobby.  It also has more of a paper finish.  The Hobby Lobby board is slicker and whiter.  I liked both, it is just something to be aware of.

Use I new blade in your box cutter. It really makes a difference.

Hot glue worked fabulous when doing the small pieces such as the stencil boxes but it dried too fast for me to use for the long pieces.  I tried just a crafty glue and while it worked, I didn’t feel it was strong enough to hold up in the long run and I ended up using the heating duct tape.  This worked well.

Before you make your cuts. Make sure it looks right on the project itself. Measuring is great but if you get off anywhere, even a little, it makes it had to mesh the two cut out pieces together.  I hope that this makes sense.

I wish I would have video taped this project for you so that you could have had a good laugh, but alas you must settle for the videos that were my inspiration.  I gleaned valuable information from them both and kinda used techniques from both as well.

Leslie Bockenstette  

Craftingsisters2

All in all I think a used about 7 or 8 foam boards and I have a little left over. I used about 2/3rd of the small roll of Heating duct tape. So in the end I spent just under $20.00 for everything.

Thanks for popping in.

Wendy and Jazz