If you dream of having all of your personal papers neatly organized or at least nicely tossed into different containers then today’s blog post should be fun.   I’m suggesting the use of plastic milk crates for storage.    While the title photo shown is of many multiple colors of crates, I have been getting white plastic crates from the dollar store.

About three years ago I discovered a fantastic pattern for making fabric liners for plastic milk crates and am sharing the information about them today with permission of their creator, Laura Gunn.   Her website is Lauragunn.com.   Thank you Laura!

When I first discovered the pattern we were getting ready for our family beach trip to Pawley’s Island.  Sew, (pun intended) I brought along my sewing machine (yes the one I blogged about last week) with the intent of making one there.   I then calculated how much duck cloth fabric it would take to make eight of them!  Yes others who have hobbies will smile reading this as you are on vacation, have a block of time and why not do a craft project like sew?   I was able to make the trip to get the fabric, cut out eight patterns and sew two of them during that trip.   I’ve brought my sewing machine along since then to an all-day scrapbooking crop and sewed one there.  I have made four so far.

Here are the tutorial instructions being shown by permission Lauragunn.com.  I’ve also added this link to her site on my Notes page under a new section called Projects.

theundercovercratewithpermissionLauraGunn  <-click here to see the four page pdf how-to instructions for “a snazzy way to cover up your ugly crates or boxes.”

Photo on right – this is the same duck fabric I used for making the under cover crate liners shown above with pink grosgrain ribbon  – just with a different grosgrain ribbon, it is sitting on a wooden slide out shelf inside armoire.

Here is another option – which I use in my scrapbooking closet – plastic milk crates are used as drawers in the grid cube wire storage unit.

Shown today are some really fun and inexpensive options that will help you with your storage for personal papers, books, crafts, and other items too!  Seeing these new options should make the idea of getting more organized worth considering.  Enjoy!

Anchors Aweigh,  

Helen