I love this. Which is funny, considering that:

1) I poke fun at friends who color-coordinate their books, and then
2) actually did it in my own home.

It’s unfortunate (or fortunate, really) that my J.Crew obsession began just weeks before my one-year shopping hiatus. Well, I’m still happily flipping through their September catalog as if my next purchase was just a click away (not a chance! So no need to stage an intervention).

Anyway, I cut out four of my favorite looks from their catalog and glued them to a boring manila file folder for a bit of inspiration and pizzazz.

And then my three year-old added his own pizzazz.

Now my personal papers are being well looked-after.

To take a closer look at these catalog pages, click: page 6, page 32, page 50, page 82.

This may be the most insane (and insanely satisfying) organization project I’ve ever done at home.

It must have been close to a year ago, while I was pregnant (which explains the insanity). I took every “buttoned” item of clothing out of mine and my husband’s closets. Then, ones with extra buttons already attached to the garments were immediately put back in.

The remaining garments were laid out in the living room with our enormous stash of extra buttons, and the matching game began.

When a match was made, the extra button was placed in one of those mini-Ziploc baggies next to a mini-Post-it note identifying the garment. For example: charcoal tweed blazer. Then, all of those identified buttons were placed in one larger Ziploc bag and stored in a drawer.

Alternatively, every button without a home was placed in a separate Ziploc bag and donated to avid sewing friends. We weeded out hundreds of buttons, arbitrarily saved for at least eight years and with no real intention of ever using them. Wow, it felt good—not just to purge the buttons, but also to accept that I was never really going to come up with a creative way to use them.

My main concern, from the start, was that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with this new system, but we have! Even items of clothing that I’ve given to friends have been given to them with the extra buttons (still labeled, thank you very much). I feel so… streamlined.