Friday, August 31, 2012

Crafty Me: I Love Labels!

One might wonder why a person who lives alone would need to have labels on 3 little bins in their closet. I'm afraid I can't really come up with a good answer for that. I would just have to say that I love organization. I love when a plan comes together. And I love graphic elements, fonts and consistency. Yeah. Crazy. So I already had a beautifully organized master/walk-in closet with matching, padded, canvas and wood hangers; rolling carts full of bins and wire drawers; wide PVC hanger bags for holiday clothes and seasonal linens; a wide shelf full of covered totes for dust protection; plenty of hooks, a full length mirror and, finally, baskets for additional sorting of clothes meant for handwashing, dry cleaning or donation. Now comes the really crazy part: adding labels to my finely tuned closet system. {LABEL NUMBER ONE}...I have a little clothing quirk: I only wear long, dark pants. No skirts, no dresses, no shorts, no white slacks. I have multiples of all kinds of dark pants: long, black, dress pants; short, narrow-leg, brown pants; wide-leg, cropped black pants; loose, comfy, weekend, black pants...well you get the idea. Thing is in the morning, with my eyes at half-mast and the sun nowhere near flooding in my closet, it's kind of hard to figure out which is which! So I made a big, retro-style label for each hanger. Now I can know at a glance where to grab the one I want. Love this idea! {LABEL NUMBER TWO}...Next up: totes and bins. This was an easy fix now that I had the hanger label design in hand! {LABEL NUMBER THREE}...The last problem that needed solving: to launder or not to launder? I read many years ago that you actually prolong the life of your clothes and preserve their condition and shape if, in lieue of harsh cleaning after every wearing, you simply let them air out once in awhile. Now after every other use or so I'll hang  each garment on a separate hook overnight. In these cases I like to mark the hangers before placing them back on the rack to insure I don't pack or store the item before re-laundering. I customized some old business cards with my new design, cut each in half and punched a hole in the center of each piece - star-shaped just for fun! I keep a bunch of these in a bowl in the closet and drop one over the neck of the hanger when I put a lightly worn blouse or jacket back on the rod. And there you have it - a peek into an obsessive-compulsive's closet dream!

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