13 Mail Organizer

I hate the mail. But I love it. I love getting the stuff I order online. But I hate the junk mail that's jammed in that tiny box and the bills and the stuff from the bank that are useless, but I still feel the need to shred. There's just so much and I hate dealing with it. While I've tried to put myself on the no junk mail lists, that problem seems to be beyond my control right now. But the storage part? The losing the mail part? That, I tried to create a little solution for... one that would make me hate the junk mail a little less!

Just to warn you, there aren't a ton of pictures because I didn't really have a plan in mind for this... I just sort of winged it and then I only made this one, so I wasn't always sure when I was doing something different or taking a real step that I needed to photograph. But, I think you can follow pretty well...

Supplies

• Several sheets of cardstock
• Fabric (several patterns, if you want, all coordinating)
• Ribbon
• Hot glue gun and gluesticks
• Regular gluestick
• Thumbtacks (and maybe a hammer)
• Wood backed canvas (roughly 8 inches wide; if the wood is thicker, then you might need the hammer)

Instructions
First, you want to grab your base fabric and stretch it across your canvas. I put some glue on the canvas, but you don't really need to. Just stretch it across and then push in some thumbtacks to hold it taut. This is what the back should look like:

At first, I used the hammer because I was worried I couldn't push them in by myself, but eventually I got stronger or my hands got numb... and the hammer fell by the wayside. Once you finish with that fabric, the front should look pretty like this:

Now, you're going to make the little pockets that hold the mail. This is where I played around a bit and don't have too many pictures, but it's really simple. I just covered a couple of sheets of cardstock in the fabric (using my regular gluestick) and left the fabric a little long so that I could wrap it around the canvas and tack it in place.

I cut the cardstock so that I had a smaller pocket on top and a larger one on the bottom, but the bottom pocket has the full 8.5" x 11" cardstock. For the bottom pocket, I tacked the bottom of it to the back bottom of the canvas.

For the top pocket, I just used my hot glue gun to glue the bottom of the pocket to the fabric covered canvas. This picture shows you how the pockets are longer than the canvas so that they can wrap around and stay loose enough that you can actually put mail in it. 

It looked a little plain, so I just glued on some ribbon and tied some little bows and glued those on too... and voila! Mail holder!

I added some little hanging brackets to the back of the canvas, on the wood part, and then hung it up and put it to use!

I'm linking up to some of my favorite conferences!