Keeping Busy: Latest Projects

Being a teacher means that I have summers off from mid-June until the beginning of August. Obviously I keep thinking about teaching, curriculum, my past students, what I want to do differently, what I can improve on, etc. etc… But in between all of that, I have to actually DO something productive or I will go crazy! Pinterest has been a great resource for finding fun and (somewhat) useful projects to fill my time.

Here are a few of the things that I have made over the past few days:

 1.) I have turned some of our old T-shirts, that we did not necessarily want to get rid of, into re-usable bags! After about 4 of them, I was cranking out a bag in 10 minutes flat, with just a few simple cuts and one zigzag stitch to close up the bottom.

Although they look like my brother's workout shirts, these are actually a few of the bags I made.

One of the bigger shirts (Adult Large) is a great size for carrying all of the bags that I made and keeping them somewhat organized in my car, between uses. This is also a good idea of what the bags look like when they are filled. 

If you would like to know how I made the re-usable bags, read on!

 1- First, cut open the neck. I used a dinner plate and a fabric pen to trace out an even semi-circle and make the hole bigger. This will be the opening of the bag.

 2- Second, cut off the arms following the seam on the sleeve. These will be the bag handles.

 When cutting off the arms, do not cut the seams. As you can see in this picture, I left the original stitching in tact to strengthen the handle.

 3- Now for the bottom. I flipped the shirt inside out at this point to sew up the bottom of the bag. Using a zigzag stitch to secure the bottom.

 To make more of a tapered corner for the bag, I folded the corners in, pinned and sewed shut. 

 There is the final project!

Another project I have taken on is to create a place to store our ticket stubs in a fun and organized way:

 This is what we used to have. A small photo book with clear plastic sleeves. As you can see, some of the tickets are too big for the album and fall out easily. 

 To solve this problem, I took another idea from Pinterest :) Using a shadow box frame (5 x 8), I removed the back and placed the tickets inside. That's it! Simple and cute.

I think I underestimated just how many ticket stubs we have all together and our box is already full! I would like to try and find a new shadow box frame, maybe something long and not so tall, to give us more space to display our ticket stubs!