Show an Old Item Some Love {Michaels RE-Love Challenge}

April is Earth Month, and it’s a great time for all of us to look around our homes and see if there are things we could be using differently or for a better purpose than we are currently.

In my house, it’s this microwave cart.

I stole it from my parents’ house when I moved out (more than 15 years ago!) and I’ve been trying to get rid of it ever since. It served as my sewing table for years, and in our current house it’s just floated from room to room. It was a piece of storage in my daughter’s playroom most recently, but lately had been shuttled into the hall where it became a gathering place for things she wasn’t really playing with and I didn’t know where to put.

I’m sure it deserves better, even though it is just a decades-old piece of pressboard. So I’m going to try to clean it up, pretty it up and make it useful for my daughter’s art area as a place for storage, a work space when she’s a bit bigger (or that I can use when we’re creating together) and a display area.

I’m doing this with a lot of help from Michaels, which supplied a $200 gift card to help me buy supplies.

Here’s some of what I got:

two cans of primer spraypaint in white
two cans of light green spraypaint
Martha Stewart chalkboard paint in blue
matching regular paint (to paint some molding I got to glue around the edges of the top, which I’ll show you if I actually do it)
set of four 12×12 cork pieces
a magnetic dry erase board
mounting tape for attaching these things to the sides

I also got the pieces of edging I mentioned earlier, some scrapbook paper to decoupage the inside of the drawer, possibly the back of the unit, and maybe some storage boxes, a few plastic storage pieces and some fresh chalk for the chalkboard.

Getting Started

The first thing I did was to take off some tape that was holding down one edge of the laminate on the side of the top and glued it down with wood glue. It’s being held in place with more tape while it dries.

I also pulled out the little cardboard door that covered the bottom shelf. I’d rather have stuff accessible, and it was ugly and falling apart anyway.

I wiped the whole thing down with a damp washcloth, and while the wood glue dried I went ahead and primed the drawer. This was super easy but made me regret letting my husband put all the giant boxes we had in the house out for the recyclers this morning!

Next up will be priming and then painting the rest of the cart, and then the fun begins.

Looking for some inspiration for your own Earth Month projects? Check out the Michaels LookBook for plenty of fun ideas to reuse items in your home.

For the past few years I’ve taken part in a Christmas in July blog hop that encourages people to get a jump on their making for holiday gifts.

I love to use yarn I already have for these projects in the hope that people will consider what they already have that they can use to make projects for themselves or to give as gifts.

This year it was a couple of knit baskets made using partial balls of yarn left in my stash from other projects.

They use the same basic pattern but the first one is made with two colors of bulky yarn, and the second used two strands of worsted weight yarn held together, which made the gauge about the same, but I cast on fewer stitches to make a smaller version.

The bottom of the basket is square, though you can make them rectangular if you’d rather. Then I just knit up the sides in rounds until I was about to run out of yarn. This gave both baskets rather short sides — maybe more like a tray than a basket — but you can keep knitting as long as you like to make the sides of your basket as tall as you want.

They’re worked in seed stitch, which keeps the edges from curling and adds a nice texture to the baskets.

Of course this also allows you to use even more odd balls from your stash. I’d love to make a big one someday combining lots of different yarn. I mean, I’d probably use it to store more yarn, but that’s a fine thing to do.

As it is, these little trays are great for sitting on your desk or bedside table to hold little things that always seem to appear there. I like to use one to hold the supplies for whatever project I’m working on, things like little scissors, my tape measure, a crochet hook, etc.

And they would make good gifts on their own or as a container to hold some other goodies if you like.

You can find the free pattern for these stash busting baskets over at Our Daily Craft.

Getting Started

Comments

Have you read?