Basketball and crafts

Hey, did you watch the NCAA basketball championship last night?  I watched the second half.  Later, I decided to revisit my bracket because I was so pleased that I had actually picked Kansas to be in the championship game. (And KU won, in my dream bracket world.) Turns out that I didn't pick Kentucky to even advance to the Sweet Sixteen in my bracket - instead, I picked Florida to represent the SEC against Kansas.  I totally didn't win.

Onward.  Crafts!!!

So there's this blog, Young House Love, that Nat told me about awhile ago. The tagline, per the website, is "1 Young Family + 1 Old House = Love."  Not hard to get behind that premise, right?  It's about this couple, John and Sherry, who blog about renovating their home (the good and the bad).  Anyway, I love it, and last week, Sherry posted about covering pieces of cork in fabric to hang behind clothes in your closet, to use as a vehicle for all of those magazine pages you tear out and mean to store in one convenient spot.

Josh can verify that our home is full of these weird little torn out pages, tucked into magazine piles and files and left on tables. I also have little fledgling idea piles in strange corners of our home...like the collection of dogs I'd like to someday have.

I read the post and thought it sounded like a neat idea, but ruled it out firmly and immediately because our closet is, well, too tightly packed for such an idea to work in that space. But then over the weekend I'm driving to Joann Fabric to get some materials for a sewing project, and all of a sudden, I want that corkboard, badly! I have to make one of my own!

And all of a sudden, I knew the perfect place for it, too.

So sad and lonely! Such underused space!

I won't recap the whole step by step process because Sherry obviously did it very well - and like the time I posted about cooking recipes from Pioneer Woman, it feels a little strange to document a project on my blog that I'm tackling only because I saw it documented on another blog.  (Super weird!)

But all you have to do is buy a pack of those little corkboard pieces, duct-tape them together, and wrap it in fabric and duct-tape the ends. Really, really easy. It took no more than eight minutes.

And voila!

One of my 101 in 1,001 items is to create and maintain an inspiration board.  It's yet to be determined if this board will be the space for that specific project.  After all, it's basically in our kitchen, which is definitely a safe space but just not a very dreamy one.  I think this might end up being a hybrid of an inspiration/idea board and visible storage for upcoming events/ideas/recipes/coupons I spot during my breakfast reading.  Maybe then I won't find coupons that expired in, like, 2005 carefully filed away - and to think: the magazine article about how to do a fishtail braid doesn't need to sit on my table for weeks and weeks anymore!

I migrated the dog pictures, too. Yay!

I may not have triumphed with my bracket, but I am happy about this pretty new spot in my home. Thanks to Young House Love for the idea!