Repurposing Ideas
~Vintage Suitcase as Correspondence Center~
I loved turning one of my vintage suitcases into a correspondence center! The perfect vessel for holding stationery, writing pens, stamps, stickers, envelopes, cards and books on letter writing…my favorite is The Gift of a Letter by Alexandra Stoddard. The top part of the suitcase can be turned into a little French memo board. I like to keep favorite letters and cards on mine, but you could use yours for: newspaper clippings, business cards, reminders, shopping lists…the possibilities are endless. When I’m not using my correspondence center I close it and display it on an antique luggage stand. It doubles as an end table!
~Canning Jar & Fork as Recipe Card Holder~
I love how much easier this makes reading a recipe when I’m in the throes of cooking!
~Rag Bag~
photographs by Melissa Placzek
A great idea inspired by the book The Handmade Home by Amanda Blake Soule. I know I’ve read about rag bags in Victorian novels, but I had never really thought about having one in my home.
” The family rag bag, the place where stained clothing, old towels and stray socks spend the remainder of their lives as rags for cleaning, is not so common these days. Over the years, many of us have strayed to the convenience of paper towels, but switching back to cloth has it’s advantages.” ~Amanda Blake Soule
I have to agree. Cotton cleans better than paper, it’s earth friendly, and using rags instead of paper towels is more frugal.
I made my rag bag out of a vintage pillowcase, but any cloth bag will do.
~Melissa
I think these are all great ideas! Love it! Right now the only thing I can think of that I do is I clean out my empty powdered creamer jugs (yes, I consume enough of it to buy it in jugs- lol) and take of the labels and use them for flour, sugar, just about anything that will fit in there. Keeps everything nice and dry, and no messy bags or boxes in the cupboards.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing!
Once I *finally* redo the metal tv tray into a chalk memo board (I’ve had the supplies sitting here for 2 months now!) I plan to hunt down a couple of mirrors & redo the frames. I need one for my bedroom wall, a small one I’d like to turn into a perfume bottle holder for my dresser and I’d love a really large one for my dining room wall. That’s as far as I am on my plans right now because I figure I need to finish the projects I have before moving on to more. That’s the theory anyway, but my creative mind moves WAY faster than my actually creating hands. LOL
The chalk/memo board sounds cool! I’m a fan of using lots of mirrors in decorating too. Very Feng Shui, hee hee 🙂
I know what you mean. My plans go faster than my ability to actually make things too. Oh well, keeps life interesting when you always have something in the ‘hopper’ LOL