The night before last I was up really late at night, waiting for the Sims 2 to load, and I found myself feeling rather bored. I started straightening up my desk but soon noticed something that’s been bothering me for quite a while: my box of alcohol swabs. It’s basically a small cardboard box of medical alcohol swabs that I keep by my desk for a multitude of reasons. I have them because I have a liquid pain medication that I use from time to time that requires drawing it up with a diabetic syringe from a small glass vial. I always clean the vial off before drawing it up, because hey, that’s just what you do, right? I suppose I don’t have to, since I don’t inject the medication into myself (I drink it), but it keeps the insides of the vial sterile.
Anyway. I’ve ended up finding about a million and one different uses for these medical alcohol swabs, so I end up getting into the box of them quite frequently. They’re great for cleaning keyboards, cleaning up all sorts of little messes, sanitizing hands; they’re awesome. I’ve even started carrying them with me all the time, because I definitely prefer them over those purell-style hand sanitizing gels. What makes those gels antibacterial is alcohol, but I hate all the extra crap they put into them – perfumes, the gel stuff, all of that just makes my hands feel super icky after using them. It feels sticky and, maybe I’m crazy, but I just don’t like the idea of having all that dead bacteria on my hand. I’m sure it’s purely psychological, but just killing it doesn’t make me feel any cleaner, cause you’re still left with a grime on your hands. With the swabs, not only are you killing the bacteria, but you’re wiping it off too.
So now that I’ve finally admitted my OCDness when it comes to my clean hands (hehe), back to the problem I was having with the box these swabs came in. The boxes are just so flimsy that they fall apart, you can’t get into them easily, and they basically just suck. Every time I pull out the box to get a swab, I think to myself, “I’ve got to find something better to put these in.” Then I go about my business (with my nice clean hands!) and forget all about it.
Finally, the night before last, while that thought ran through my head again, I decided to finally do something about it!
| Ta da! I made that! 🙂 I’m so proud of my cute little heart box! I made it entirely out of paper, duct tape, some decorative heart tape I had laying around my room, and clear plastic packing tape. And you can’t quite tell from the photo, but that box is solid! It’s not flimsy at all. I did enough layers of duct tape that the cute little box has some nice solid sides to it. Isn’t it cute? Unfortunately the clear plastic tape showed up more in the photo than it does in real life, thanks to the fact that I took this photo in the dark at like 4 in the morning, and thus had to use the flash. But oh well. You can at least see what it looks like. 🙂 I don’t remember where I got the heart tape but I’ve had it forever and have always wanted to use it for something cute and handy. Now I finally have! |
My favorite part of the box is, if you look closely, I cut out hearts to cover the corners of the box. I got the box pretty much covered and then I kept looking at the corners. They were bare, you could see a slit of the duct tape, and I kept trying to come up with some way to cover it without messing up the lines of the rest of the box. Finally I looked at all the scraps I had leftover from covering the rest of it, and there were enough hearts leftover in the scraps to cut them out and cover the corners. I even had one leftover to put in the middle of the inside of the box! So not only did I make a cute box, I used up all the scraps too. 🙂 If you wanna see the bottom of the box, click here for the photo.
I’m really tempted to try making something else now. I have a good amount of the heart tape left, and now I’m sorta tempted to buy some of the decorative tapes that Archie McPhee has up for sale. I really like their cowboy tape, although the sushi tape is pretty cute too. I’m gonna have to go looking online now to see what other kinds of decorative tapes I can find. 😀
What do you think, can you come up with any other ideas about stuff I could make out of paper, duct tape, and some cute decorative tape? I’ve seen some people make wallets out of duct tape before, but I already have a really nice wallet. Anybody else have any creative ideas you’d like to see me try out? 🙂 Throw out some ideas and I’ll see what I can do. But of course, keep it within reason – I’m not about to try making any scale replicas of the Taj Mahal out of duct tape or anything. 🙂