Reuse Cricut Mats

I finally have my Cricut back up and running after several months of technical difficulties.

I love our Mac, my Cricut does not.

 

So I'll hopefully be sharing lots of Cricut posts soon.

There are a couple of ideas that I've tried recently and wanted to let you know, they really work!

The mats are expensive and I seem to use up all of their stick pretty fast.

 

For at least the past year I've been using this tip to make my mats restick

 She has fantastic Cricut tips so go check it out.

I have a few mats that are so covered with crud it's just gross.

Yesterday I came across this post

 

for cleaning Cricut Mats. It didn't work for me as smoothly as it did for her, but it was definitely worth it. Just an FYI, I left the spray on my mat for at least an hour  and I still had to scrape hard, but it didn't damage my mat at all. I wasn't able to get all of the residue off, and that could have something to do with the Zig I've added to it, but it was 10x better. I used dish soap and hot water to wash my mat off once I was done cleaning it.

This morning after it was dry I could tell that some of the original stick is back, but I will probably go ahead and add some anyway.

Lego Book Organization

I've planned on doing something similar for a while now, but in all fairness I saw this post and it finally got my butt in gear. We don't have a huge collection of Legos yet but the instruction books that come with them are already becoming a problem.

 I took a couple of plain black notebooks and some page protectors (both of which we had) and started filling them up. The books are put together with simple staples so it's easy to take them out and pull the pages apart.

 At first I was only putting one page per sleeve but then The Mister pointed out that I could run one project on the top and one on the bottom. Duh.

Oh....I just got an idea to dress up the notebooks and make them recognizable to the boys. More later.....

Dresser update!

I have this old dresser that's been in our family for, well ever. It belonged to my older sisters at one point and has been painted a bazillion different colors. I actually heard a story about white paint and purple food coloring one time. Esh. 

My mom and I repainted it dark blue and put white handles on it when I was about fourteen. It has since been moved to about four different houses and has been used for a variety of purposes, the most recent as the boys' dresser.

As you can see it was starting to look a little sad.

So....I did this!

 It's a little crazy and it's bright and fun and I love it! I tried to tape off my lines when I added the white stripes and ended up with major bleed through. So I left my test drawer sitting around for a few days and decided I actually like it that way. It reminds me of chalk lines on football fields.

 Micheal's has these really cute sports handles, which is what inspired the entire thing.

 A can of paint and new handles, they have a new dresser for $20.00, love that part.

 Unfortunately it sat outside for three days while I painted and apparently sucked up some summer moisture because the drawers are all sticking horribly.

Seems like I remember that you can rub wood sliders with a bar of soap to make them slide better. Hm....I'll have to give it a try.