DIY Dinosaur Implement Holders

Get ready for it...drumroll please...

We are finally all unpacked and settled in! And it only took a week! All the boxes have been unpacked and recycled, artwork put up on the walls, and inaugural meal cooked. The only things yet to be taken care of are selling an old desk, coffee table, and end table, and then acquiring an ironing board. I'd love to get a hold of a used one, but I don't know where any of the good thrift stores are in this area yet. So it looks like garment sewing will have to wait a little longer.* Boo. This is especially sad since, according to all the sewing blogs I'm reading, autumn is right around the corner and I should be pulling out my plaids and tweeds, instead of still mucking around with bright cheery cottons. Well, I live in sunny SoCal, and I will stubbornly continue sewing sundresses until October, I say!

In the meantime, while packing and unpacking, I discovered a bag of miniature glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs and two picture frame shelves that were languishing unfulfilled in life. Since I was in such a domestic, organizing-type mood, I decided to turn them into a rack like this one from ModCloth. Since I already had all the materials, I saved $59.99 + S&H!

I started with cutting all my dinosaurs in half, right in between their front and hind legs. I tried using an X-acto knife first, then a box cutter, but the tiny blades made my cut sort of uneven, so eventually I just whipped out my fancy Henckels Santoku and starting cutting them up on the cutting board. When my husband saw my set-up, he definitely had one of those double take, WTH, oh-okay-it's-just-my-wife-being-weird moments. I think the husbands of crafters must have a lot of those moments.

I figured that since these guys weren't going to be holding up much weight, I didn't need to go crazy with putting in bolts and all, but if I were to do this for say, a clothes rack or purse rack, I would definitely use bigger dinosaurs and follow the directions here. I ended up just using my handy hot glue gun to attach the dinosaurs. This had the added bonus of making it look like the dinosaurs were either melting, or bursting out of the shelf, or trapped in the La Brea tar pits.

Noooo!! I'm meltiiiing!!!

 I let the glue dry overnight, then put them up: one next to the front door, for keys, and one above my craft table for sewing tools and notions. I love them so much, because 1) dinosaurs were my first obsession, way back in elementary school, and 2) they glow in the dark, so if I ever need to pink something in the middle of the night and there's a power outage, I will be able to find my pinking shears!

I used the butts for my sewing stuff since the sewing room is less public. Some people might be offended by dinosaur posteriors.

They kind of look like they're in medieval stocks, with signs declaring them as Toyota or Honda hanging round their necks.

Making these dinosaur racks reminded me of how much I used to love dinosaurs. There was a time when my brother and I had a whole collection of plastic models, and we would make elaborate dioramas in our bookcase. We would always check out dinosaur books from the library and lament the lack of new ones. I can't believe I used to know almost all the dinosaurs, their diets and eras and predators and prey and everything! I really hope that my kids will also be into dinosaurs, because I totally want to live vicariously through them with beds like this or this. In the meantime, I will smile every time I grab my keys.

*I did manage to sew a little bit only a couple days after moving in, though, as a trip to IKEA with a friend resulted in curtains that needed to be shortened. Now, normally I would abide by the words of my sewing idol, the Selfish Seamstress, and refuse to do home dec sewing for someone else, but this was an excuse to unpack my machine before other, more practical items.