Milk Carton Repurposing

It's the 100th!! Yahoo!(So don't forget to join the giveaway, here, if you haven't already! :) I thought it would be fun to do some kind of spectacular post being the 100th, but it wasn't coming to me. So we'll just have another regular sort of post, but it will be a little of best of the both worlds in crafty, kid, and a little in food, (okay, maybe not the BEST of both worlds, but still pretty fun).

But first, a little fun background.

 As long as I can remember, growing up, my family has used this:

milk, Good ol Morning Moos. It is a powder form that you mix with water and Wall-ah, you have milk. Some probably only use it as an emergency sort of milk, but growing up it was THE milk. And well, believe it or not, I actually liked it growing up, so we've kept using it now that I have a family of my own. My husband has a slight form of lactose-intolerance so not having straight regular milk around that doesn't make my husband sick, it was pretty easy to convince him to incorporate it in our lives.

We did some numbers on it and it is overall somewhat cheaper than buying regular fresh gallon milk (it varies since fresh milk prices go up and down, and the powder milk prices go up and down, but overall it came out cheaper). And it has been very convenient to use, if we ran out of milk, we just made more, we don't have to worry about running to the store in the middle of night for cereal in the morning, and in some ways it is easier to cook with as well. But as a disclaimer, it does taste a little different than regular milk, I personally don't notice that much of difference, but I know others that think the difference is enough that they hate the powder and would never use it. So everyone is different, but if you think your family could use a little extra crunch in the budget, this is a small great way to go. And just for fun here is the nutrition facts for you in case you are curious about it, and they say it is comparable to 2% regular milk, and if you'd like to compare the two, here is the nutrition facts for that.

Sorry for the long background story, but I thought it would be fun to give you a little extra info in case you care to ever "venture" in the powdered world too. This is what we drink for our milk. But then we have our little girl. Now that she is over one and is finally off breast milk, she has been drinking whole milk. Since I wasn't sure if giving her our powdered milk would be the best thing, at least at her young age, we have been buying fresh milk for her. It has only been a few months of buying it and I am appauled at how many gallons we buy each month, we have milk cartons building up out the wazoo! And if you know me, you know I would have to do something with these suckers, especially since they have a fun handle on them!

 So I started out in making fun little toy carton sort of things for her. All I did was cut off the part with the lid, and cut a big enough opening for there to be an actual opening to put things in.

 With the handle sticking outward it becomes very easy for my girl to be able to go up and pull out what she wants, carry it around, and go at it. She loves carrying them around.

 Then for fun crafty and easy clean up sake, I thought it would be fun to make labeling, so I mod podged black construction paper over the regular milk label. When the mod podge dried, it becomes a great little chalk board, easy to label what is inside them, easy to put the right toys in the right carton. And if I change the toys around, I can easily simply erase and re-write the new contents.

 She loves carrying it around, planting on the floor and checking out her stuff.

And last but not least, on another crafty note, I have a nice amount of space on the back of my crafty dresser that I can stash a row of these cartons and they work great for putting my current on going projects. So many of my projects have a mix of little and big items, and I always worry about loosing them in the mix of things and messing up the projects. But now with this lovely set-up, I can easily hold the contents of my projects in individual cartons, and if I have to pause in mid project (mostly to take of my little girl's needs) then I can store then back in their container for future start up again without anything getting lost. And again, they can be labeled, reminding me what I am currently working on.

Now I know I will probably get to a point where I just can't save these things anymore, but for the time being it has been fun to re-use them in a more purposeful way.

What sort of things do you use empty milk cartons for?

Thanks for stopping by and don't forget to join the giveaway! You can go at the top of the page, or go HERE for more details! Thanks again and again for all the support, I greatly appreciate it all, so very much!

Until next time!

Storage boxes

As promised, this Fall Feature I will share some boxes that I just finished yesterday. Remember when I did the quilted storage boxes? Well these are similar but a little different at the same time.

Funny how as my girl gets older and more mobile throughout the house her things start spreading over too. She used to have all her toys in her room back when she was a tiny wee lad, but now that she plays and plays and mostly out in the living room, it was time to make some nice toy boxes for her in the living room to go with all this extra playing.

We like to buy whippies and diapers (when we do buy the occasional disposable for her out and abouts and our traveling) in bulk boxes because it seems to be lots cheaper that way and they seem to last forever (which means one less lovely trip to the store, yeah!). So it also turns out that these boxes are perfect sizes for our book shelves, which means perfect toy boxes. But I had to spruce them up a little of course.

So here is how they turned out. . . .

 This basket was my first inspiration, I liked the idea of have the cloth inside, so I used the inside as a pattern.

 Then I painted all the boxes a nice simple black

 Almost ready and dried!

 For the inside I cut 5 pieces, two long ones for the length of the boxes, two shorter ones for the width of the boxes and one more for the bottom. I used the above cloth inside piece as my guide but if you make these on your own you could just measure your box and make sure the pieces are a little bigger to allow for seams.

 Then I sewed all the pieces together, having the smaller ones in between. Then I  sewed them all together to make a circle. Then I sewed it to the bottom piece. Then I sewed a circle of elastic on the other end so it would sit a little more snug in the boxes. Here is how the final products turned out. . .

 The top box I store my books that I don't want my little girl getting into, but the rest are her toy boxes.

 More toy boxes!

And then a box for all her musical toys.

And of course we can't forget they are all matchy matchy, which if you know me, I love it when I can make it work out that way :)

What do you think? I love how they turned out, and they didn't cost me an extra dime cuz I used stuff from what I already had. Yeah for saving money! :)

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day! Come join me tomorrow for a "Sun-up Saturday!"

Until next time. . .