Here's what you'll need:

• a fairly sturdy box: use whatever size will accommodate your storage needs - I used a shoe box
  
• enough TP rolls to fill it
• double-sided tape (glue would also work, but DS tape is quicker for those of us who are impatient)
  

Start by lining up your TP rolls inside the box to see how they'll fit. If you have a gap at the bottom, that's perfect: you can place your weighting wood/cardboard there. If you have gaps at the sides, you could adhere some cardboard to the insides of the box to fill the gaps (or get creative by adding in some other odds and ends).

Now, take one of your TP rolls. Put a piece along the length of the tube at the side (at 9:00), and another one along the bottom (at 6:00). (Sorry, the TP roll in the photo is flipped over so you can actually see the tape.) You'll affix the 9:00 sticky side to the side of the box, and you'll affix the 6:00 sticky side to the bottom of the box. Repeat this across the bottom of the box. You'll need to apply double sided tape to three sides of the last TP roll in the row.

Repeat the process for the remaining rows. For the top row, you'll need an additional piece of double sided tape on the top side (12:00) of each roll. It's a little tricky getting the last TP roll of each row into the tight space, but you can be pretty aggressive. It's cardboard, after all.

And there you have it, folks: an uber cool organizer with lots of tubular compartments for all your crafty tools. If you're really ambitious, you can decorate the outside of the box. I covered mine with some old wrapping paper I had laying around.

And hey, if you're not arty or crafty - and don't get all keyed up by seeing beautifully organized markers - you can use this organization station to store other stuff around the house. You could use it to store wires and cables, your assortment of string and twine, pens . . . anything you like . . . except knives, maybe.

Again and again, I am reminded that necessity truly is the mother of invention.

I'm always on the hunt for bead storage solutions in my studio. I get a lot of my beads by disassembling old, forsaken necklaces: that means I end up with a lot of small piles of beads, and I don't usually have enough tiny bags or containers to separate them. And though the current disaster-area state of my studio would indicate otherwise, I do like to keep things organized.

A recent pizza night at my house offered a solution. I was cleaning up after chowing down on a large with pepperoni, bacon, mushrooms and green olives (mmmmm), and was washing out the half-finished containers of dipping sauce. (I am not a dipping sauce fan, but my husband, Dan, is.) These plastic containers can be recycled in my city, but as I washed them out, I thought, "Hmmm . . . they're small, they have lids, they're kind of transparent . . . perfect!" I washed them extra thoroughly to remove any residual aromas. I don't want garlic-scented beads, after all.

These wee containers are so perfect for storing small piles of beads. I can't believe I hadn't thought of it before. Besides the virtues I've already mentioned, they're also lightweight and stackable. They could be reused as small storage for all kinds of things around the house: buttons, tacks, nails and screws, game pieces, paper clips . . . you know, all those little odds and ends that dwell among the dust bunnies at the bottom of your junk drawer.

Reusing these dipping sauce containers combines two things I love, love, love: reducing waste and saving money!!

I made the white flower on this card by layering pieces of white tissue paper for the petals, and bunching together small shreds of tissue paper for the centre.

I made the flowers on this card with scraps of blue and yellow tissue paper.

Here, I played around with some tissue paper to create texture for a painted background. I painted some gloss medium onto a piece of paper, then laid tissue paper loosely on top, and pressed down lightly to adhere it. Then, I painted over the surface with more gloss medium to set all the interesting textures created by the tissue paper.

I used red tissue paper that contains little pieces of coloured foil to make the crystalline paper in this bookmark. If you look closely, you can see the book's words through the paper.

Here's some crystalline paper that I made with green tissue paper and circles of white and teal tissue paper. I took the picture of the paper hanging in a window to show the beautiful translucency of the paper.

I really love winter, especially when it's extra snowy, but by late February, I start to get the garden itch. By mid-March, I'm very itchy: my living room floor is strewn with garden books and Lee Valley catalogs, and my Google search history is peppered with garden blogs.

It has been an especially long winter where I live in Hamilton, Ontario. It's April, and winter still isn't quite ready to leave. When it finally does, I will dig into the plans (pun very much intended) I've been making for the last two itchy months.

This year, my big plan is to add some decoration and colour to the un-plantable spaces around my house with potted perennials. Wha?! Potted perennials, you say? Yep. It can be done.

I'm not a fan of annuals, and I'm not good at growing them. But I adore perennials, and I'm okay at growing them, so I did a little research to see how they might fare in containers. It turns out they do just fine. Several varieties will even survive through the winter, and that's what I'm after. This great article about how to grow potted perennials has a helpful list of such varieties and explains some techniques for over-wintering your potted perennials.

Growing perennials in containers has several virtues:

• You can add plant life to spaces where you can't grow anything (like that awkward space beside your house or on your patio).
• You can add colour to areas of the garden that are finished flowering.
  
• When you divide perennials in your garden, you have a use for the divisions your friends don't want.
• You don't have to spend money each spring on new annuals for all your pots.

Fortunately, a lot of the plants I already have in my garden do well in containers: Bellflower (Campanula), Coneflower (Echinacea), Coral Bells (Heuchera), Creeping Phlox, Daylily (Hemerocallis), Hardy Geranium (Cranebill), Hosta and Jacob's Ladder (Polemonium). (Check out the above article for more varieties.) All I need to do is divide what I already have: my only cost will be some potting soil. Still, I might just have to poke around some garden centres to see if some other perennials need a new home . . .