too da loo

About this same time last year a friend of mine posted a link to the following page or something similar: 20-things-to-do-with-toilet-paper-rolls. Now I'm always up for a challenge and love thinking out of the box and recycling, so doing something along these lines was just up my alley....

I really love no. 8 Cable Storage and since cables can be a nightmare I opted to tackle this one!

You may have seen my post on my mola desk tidy. The different drawers hold paper and notebooks, I have for USB keys and memory cards and one for cords and cables: iPhone, camera cable, cable for my label machine etc...

I decided to paint the inside of each roll black with plain acrylic paints; super easy and dries in no time. Then in keeping with my mola theme I cut out swatches that fit the size of the tube and mod podged over the whole thing to make it stick and give it a great finish.

Originally I had printed the labels for each roll contents in white onto the mola design, but it didn't stand out nicely, so I opted to print labels with white text on a black background and add them on top of each roll.

In German there is an expression I love for jumbled up cables: Bandsalat (translated Cable salad). Well, no more "Bandsalat" on this desk. Every cable is in its space nicely tucked away! And how perfect is this, a toilet paper roll fits perfectly into a drawer!!!

If you're looking for more toilet paper roll inspiration check this page out on Pinterest.

Have you made anything fun with toilet paper rolls?

mr. postman

We buy stamps and I store them away somewhere, and of course when it comes to mailing a letter, it's impossible to find them....typical!! So I decided to create a space for them to "live" where I'm sure they won't get lost in other papers on my desk!

My dad smokes cigars in different sizes and regularly keeps the small cigarillo tins for me, so I have a little stash that was waiting for me to transform them.

Now, what better to decorate a stamp tin with than with...stamps! I found a stash of old stamps, placed them in warm water to unglue the bits of paper they were stuck to and sorted through them to chose the ones I wanted to use.

Lucky for me the stamps fit perfectly to cover the tin lid. A couple of coats of Mod Podge and hey presto....

 

 
So now I know exaclty where they are when I need them! I'm still contemplating attaching a magnet to the back of the tin and I could stick them on my magnet board behing the front door for very easy access....

any other uses for cigar boxes or stamps??

mélimélo molas

Now if you read my post about "where I'm from" you'll recall that I was born and raised in Panama. When we lived there my parents started a collection of molas which were always on display in our home. My parent's housewarming gift when I moved into my first apartment in Paris were 6 autographed black and white prints of paintings of the Canal Zone done by Al Sprague, our Canal Zone neighbor and a fantastic artist. So really the art of Panama has followed me since childhood.

So it won't come as a big surprise that I would have chosen to theme our bedroom with this and other Panamanian art...

Now, you may be wondering what exactly is a mola? I like to describe them like drawings I did as a kid where you covered a sheet of paper with lots of colors, and then covered the whole thing up in black (using crayons). Then with a needle you would etch your drawing into the black and the colors would come through from underneath. Now surfing the net I found a site that is dedicated to molas and the "molagirl's" explanation is most probably a bit better than mine. Her website also offers plenty of information on the Kuna Indians who make them and the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama where they live.

Now I've had this project on my radar for a while, and I'm so happy I finally got to it. It all started with a Christmas gift: a new printer! Such a cool gift... did not see that one coming!!

This new baby is a little bit deeper than our previous printer, and so I embarked on a mission to rearrange our desk space. Purging, reorganizing, streamlining, rethinking the space to best suit our needs, and hopefully getting rid of some of the clutter. So by the end of the day, the desk looked like this:

 

I was pretty happy with the result, but it looked like a bare canvas crying out to be played with....and so I did! 

And thanks to our new printer I was able to print out some cool detail photographs of molas 

to embellish some of the elements on our desk.

I chose mola details rather than a full mola as I felt the graphic look would be visually stronger, and I think that was the right choice. I cut the rectangles to fit the front of the drawers - the tricky part being to cut out the U shape slot!

And then thanks to Mod Podge I varnished them onto the drawers for a nice glossy effect. 

I am really quite happy with the end result!

To tie in the two magazine holders in which I'm holding the "To Do" admin and other clutter I haven't yet sorted out,

I cut out two more designs and using the same technique dressed them up too!

And here you have the end result:

Just for fun, I decided to change our computer background to a mola visual, which really gives the whole desk and brand new look!

Quite amazing what a little color, a printer and some glue can do!

Here's one more side by side before & after shots:

If you're interested in seeing what Al Sprague does, you can check out his website here!

I'm curious to know, had you heard about molas before?