I’ve been needing a bookmark for weeks now (my copy of The Memory Keeper’s daughter will never recover from all its folded corners), but I haven’t managed to get over to Hallmark to pick one up. I did, however, get to the mall and buy more new pairs of jeans than one person could wear in a lifetime (I’ve mentioned a slight obsession I have with shoes and accessories in a previous post and I may have a similar penchant for skinny jeans, as well). Anyway, while wearing said jeans and reading said book, I had a genius idea. Sale hangtags had been looped through the belt by pretty faux-suede ribbons. These ribbons happened to be the perfect size bookmark. Problem solved!

That got me thinking about what other inventive uses I could find for stuff that was laying around the house. Good Housekeeping recently featured a clever craft using a mint tin as a pen holder. Tin + scrap fabric + a magnet = crafty pen holder.

My office is getting prettier by the day! I didn’t actually have a spare magnet on hand, so I straightened a paper clip and looped it through the hinge where the lid had gone, then hung it over a board instead of sticking it on there magnetically. Paper clips have actually come in handy in a lot of crafts recently…and when I didn’t have ornament hangers this Christmas, I DID have paper clips – problem solved!

A lot of the most inventive crafts I’ve seen have featured everyday household items. You can hollow out an old hardcover book to store emergency cash (or pizza money, a top-secret stash of chocolate, credit cards you were supposed to cut up, etc). If you have leftover greeting cards from the holidays, try cutting them into gift tags or folding them into small boxes (see the method for that over at The Bearister Bookcase). What clever crafts have you done with household items recently?