Repeating a post from earlier this year since Christmas 2012 is over.

I started this blog in 2006 while in grad school so I could keep my family informed of what I was doing when I was taking study breaks. Over Christmas, I told my mom I was going to make an ornament organizer box from Martha Stewart in the hopes of getting all my ornaments into one box. This past week, she emailed asking if I made the box, I said I did, then she asked for a photo and I said I’ll blog about it.

Yes, my tree is smaller than the box that holds the items to decorate it, but read on because there’s more than just ornaments in that box.

Here’s why I’m not a tutorial blogger, I was so into listening to Jeopardy that I didn’t stop to take photos. But honestly, I don’t think you need to see photos of me using a box cutter or glue gun.

Plastic box – $6 at Target’s after Christmas sale. I was looking for one with the most rectangle, straight up and down walls so that cutting the cardboard would be easy(aka wouldn’t have to find a tape measure to measure the bottom of the box to size the cardboard).

Cardboard – I used cardboard bottoms of boxes that are used to shipped books to the library so they are plenty stiff to hold the weight of the ornaments

Plastic cups – I chose both clear, short, wide-mouth wine glasses and tall, 16oz cups
I wanted to have two compartment sizes for fitting all sizes of ornaments since this would not be used for round, glass ornament storage like Martha shows. With using two different size cups, I was able to fit a different number of cups on each cardboard piece.

After positioning the cups on the cardboard, keeping in mind that if the walls of your storage tub are not straight up and down, you will not want to place the cups (including the tops) too close to the edge, you glue them to the cardboard. I added ribbon loops to serve as handles for pulling the levels out.

After putting all my ornaments in, I have room for more. A few childhood ornaments that I probably won’t use in the next few years, but I don’t want to get rid of were left wrapped in napkins and labeled. Next year, there will be no surprises when decorating the tree and it will be very fast to put decorating and un-decorate the tree!

Notes:
Martha and LifeHacker via Re-Nest suggest using egg cartons but none of my ornaments or decorations are small enough to use this idea.

Using the original box that ornaments come only works if they’re store bought and come with boxes. The few of mine that were store-bought and had boxes took up so much room and I had two boxes for ornaments. Many of mine are homemade or come from places that display and sell ornaments off trees and no box is available. With this new organization, all my ornaments plus stocking, Santa, yarn tree and advent box fit in one box. In another box, I have my holiday plates, ceramic tree and my hot pink tree hangs out alone. Two boxes and a tree is all I need to decorate for Christmas!