Make Something May – Day 1

 

Wouldn’t you know, on the first day of my Make Something May challenge, I almost tried to use the “I don’t have time” excuse.  On the first day!!!  Of course I wouldn’t actually let that happen, so in my 15 minutes I had to whip something up before heading out the door with the hubs for date night, I was able to throw together an updated version of our change jar.

Here’s what it looked like in the beginning.

Yep, I’m not gonna lie – that’s pretty embarrassingly hideous.  As you can see, I tried to take the original label off of the container at some point in time, but my attempt was clearly unsuccessful.  So it has looked like this for several months.  It’s always been on my “to do” list to make it pretty, but of course that’s one of those projects that continues to creep to the bottom of that list as other projects get added to the list.

To get started, I just combed through my supply of scrapbook paper.  I don’t have nearly as much as I used to, but Michael’s recently had a pretty huge sale on paper stacks, so I may have bought one….or three.  I settled on a couple of pieces of scrapbook paper from my Recollections Home Basics paper pad.

This particular paper stack is pretty awesome because there are a few pages scattered throughout that have quotes on them that can be used in scrapbooking and crafting or even be framed.  The piece above with the inspiring words about following your dreams seemed pretty perfect for this project since the purpose of the change jar is to save a little bit extra here and there to help us reach our dreams.  We’ve been saving our spare change and dollar bills since we moved in together.  Every so often, we set a goal for an amount we need in there that will help us achieve something great.  The last time we cashed it in, we had somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 extra to take on an amazing vacation.  And we didn’t even spend it all – it’s hard to when you’ve worked so hard to get to that point!

Besides the jar being hideous with the half ripped off label and in need of an update, my hope is that because it’s pretty much all covered, we’ll leave it sit longer before curiosity strikes and we dump it all out to see how much we have (which almost always leads to conversations about how we can spend it).  So with the paper I chose above, I was able to update our change jar to this:

I literally just used a glue stick and wrapped the paper around the jar.  I also decided the lid to the jar didn’t look quite right in basic white, so it got an update with some nice gold glitter ribbon I had leftover from a Christmas decoration I made years ago.

It’s not a huge project by any stretch of the imagination, but I do feel fulfilled for the day.  I made something in less than 15 minutes and didn’t let my excuses get in the way.  Day 1 = success! 🙂