Read from the Beginning

Handmade DIY Desk Organizer

DIY Desk Organizer (or Don’t IY Because it Was Not Easy)

Erica, Free

My job is terrible. That will never change, but I do have the tiniest bit of control over my surroundings. I had a small epiphany a while ago that just because I don’t enjoy any aspect of being an administrative assistant at a swag factory doesn’t mean I can’t try to enjoy myself, at least a little bit, at work. It’s going to take a while to find a new job and I don’t want to wait until then to be happy.

I thought a natural place to start was the small, cluttered pile of office supplies on my desk. My paperclips and thumbtacks, etc. would look so much better in a cute little tray. Of course, I figured I’d make one myself to make it more personal and save money (more on that later). While I was at it, I decided to take the opportunity to finally have tea at my desk. I really wanted to get as much happiness out of each day as possible.

Since I’m not going to use these trays to carry anything, I just made them out of cardboard, scrapbook paper, and mod podge. Eventually, I also included jars I had saved because I like jars and a nice thrifted mug and saucer for the tea tray. I made sure to purchase all my extras and choose my jars before I started working on the trays so that everything would fit. I did end up making some substitutions in the end.

The office supplies were at my desk anyway, so I started with the tea tray. I rushed and it came out a bit sloppy. I took my time with the office supplies tray and it came out a little better, but still not perfect. And that’s fine. They don’t have to be perfect to be nice to look at.

From start to finish, both trays took me about four months, but doesn’t mean I spend four months working on it. I got the idea, bought the supplies, let everything sit around my house for a while, forgot which paper I meant to use on the outside and which paper I meant to use on the inside, never remembered, finally made the tea tray, that was a lot, waited a few more months, and finally had a free weekend to make the office tray. One has floral print on the outside, one has floral print on the inside, I have a lot of extra scrapbooking paper that I need to think of something to do with, it’s fine.

Here’s a slightly under-exposed photo of the finished product. I took the pictures at night and had to take the tray back to work the next day.

Here’s a breakdown of my process:

Supplies for the office tray (Tea tray was similar, I just bought a teacup and strainer)

SuppliesCost  Notes
Mod Podge*$5.99 
Craft Paper*$2.844 sheets @$.71 ea
Sponge Brush*$0.99 
Cardboard$3.791 box of cereal
Lotion Jars (for tacks and paper clips)$19.982 jars @ $9.99/jar
Peanut Butter Jar (for pens and pencils)$5.00 
Total* (* is things I had to buy)$9.82 
Total Total$38.59(Obviously I ate the cereal and used the lotion. Nothing was wasted)
Active time6 hours(per tray)

Steps:

  1. Plan, Plan, Plan: planning is everything when you’re working without instructions. For this project, I measured each item and decided how big that section of the tray needed to be. I cut out a square or rectangular piece of paper for each section and arranged them into an approximately rectangular shape. I adjusted the dimensions so it actually made a rectangle, then planned out the dimensions of every single piece of cardboard and paper I would need to cut. All this took two hours.
  2. Cut some stuff (but be careful): Please measure twice and cut once. Or better yet, measure twice, step away, make sure your dimensions were correct in the first place, measure again, then cut. And for the love of all that is good in the world, label things. If you’re cutting all your cardboard and paper out at once, there’s a good chance you won’t use some of it for a while and you don’t want to forget which piece is which, then spend hours re-measuring everything. This took about an hour.
  3. Start gluing!: This part gets a little messy. Make sure you lay down some wax paper before you start. If you want to mod podge the bottom as well as the inside, you will have to do this in stages. There doesn’t seem to be one way that’s inherently faster. If you start with the bottom, you’ll have to let that dry before you start the inside, and if you do the inside first, you’ll probably have to secure the dividers while they dry (I used clothespins) before you can glue the bottom. Such is life. Not including the drying time, this took about 3 hours. 
  4. Bonus!: If you have extra scrapbook paper and want to make cute little jars to keep your stuff in, cut small labels out of plain paper, mod podge them to a circle of extra scrapbook paper, and mod podge that to the lid of the jar. Or cur out a rectangle of scrapbook paper about the circumference of the jar (a little extra for overlap), and label the side of the jar. Now it looks like it all came as a set!

-Erica

Project Reflection: Overcoming My Hatred of Mistakes

Erica, Free

I’ve never been good at correcting, or even acknowledging my mistakes. Since childhood, I’ve had this internalized idea that success means doing something right on the first try. If I can’t do something right the first time, I just move on to something else. My tea tray and office tray project gave me a built-in opportunity to break that pattern.

How did I convince myself to acknowledge my mistakes and learn from them? I was sneaky. I started at the beginning, by planning and purchasing the supplies for two trays at once. In my normal drive for efficiency, I assumed I would build the trays concurrently. That didn’t happen.

Please excuse the weird lighting. I took this one evening after work when the lighting was bad and then I took it back to work with me.

I started the tea tray right away. After what I assumed would take one evening dragged into a second day, I was determined to finish as soon as I could. The result was predictably sloppy. It was still serviceable and looked fine from afar, but I know the bottom is not as sturdy as it could be and the dividers are not evenly placed.

Normally, if I had only planned to make one tray, I would decide that it was fine and never try something like that again. But I had all these cereal boxes and sheets of scrapbook paper haphazardly stored in my living room. Every time my cats would start to mess with them was reminded of the next project in my queue. One that I now knew would take longer than originally planned.

So I waited until I knew I would have enough time. Revolutionary idea, I know. But for someone so impulsive, it kind of is. I remembered exactly what I wanted to change from my first attempt. I wanted to make the tray itself out of a single piece of cardboard and interlock the dividers rather than just gluing them. When I reached a point where I started doing sloppy work, I packed up for the day and returned when I had more energy to focus. The end result is not perfect, but it the outside is made of one piece of cardboard and the dividers interlock.  

I’m not too much of a perfectionist that I’ll redo them right away, but I’m also not to scared to attempt them again in the future.

-Erica

Embroidery Pattern of Ginkgo Leaves

Curtains and Quiet Time: My Nightly Wind Down Routine

Erica, Free

Embroidery is my preferred creative outlet. I like to make everyday objects a little more interesting and personal. At the beginning of quarantine, when there seemed nothing else to do and I was spending all my time at home, I decided to make some curtains from old sheets and embroider them. I’ll save the process of making the curtains for a later post. Right now I just want to write about how it has given me a greater appreciation for quiet time.

Embroidery is a very time-consuming craft. The repetition can be relaxing, even meditative, but it can also cause a serious underestimation of the time needed to complete a project. I’ve been working on my curtains for over a year and I’m less than halfway finished. Three of nine curtains are serving their purpose while the fourth through ninth languish in project limbo.

When I realized the project would take much longer than anticipated, I got overwhelmed. Ideas for new projects kept adding themselves to my mental queue. I was working on my curtains almost obsessively so I could start something new. I was watching more TV than normal because I was working longer. The late-night screen time began to interfere with my sleep, and was the lack of sleep was driving me crazy. I reached a point where I realized how important it is to slow down and wind down.

I started by allowing myself to work on the curtains in smaller sessions. They were going to take forever whether I decided to race to the finish line or not. Breaking the project up also meant I could work on smaller projects in the meantime, chipping away at my queue. I spent some portion of each session, if not all of it, in silence. With no screens or audiobooks to distract me, I was able to focus more on my embroidery and achieve that meditative aspect. Falling asleep was much easier when the last half-hour before bed was not spent wrestling with the decision to watch one more episode.

That is not to say that I magically developed the ability to laser focus. I still get distracted easily. Sometimes it’s my own thoughts and worries for the coming workday. Sometimes it’s my cats’ strange obsession with the peeling paint bubble in the corner of my living room ceiling. They’re always staring up at it even though the only thing up there is the ugly off-white paint some previous tenant had to contend with.  Other times my bedroom door will move opposite the direction the floor tilts. I normally would have assumed this was the cats, but now I know one is on the couch with me and one on the chair across from me.

Sometimes I listen for the sound of my neighbors. Not always to eavesdrop, but just to know that there are other people aimlessly puttering around their apartments in the evening. The sounds comforted me during the worst of quarantine. Letting them creep me out would only make me feel more alone. I find myself imagining them in my own kitchen, my own bedroom, to the point it almost feels like someone is there, if only in the other room.

-Erica