Excuse me...but do you have any Bon Coupon?

click the pic to embiggen

MY GOODNESS it is difficult to take pictures of shiny things, but when you are in love with aluminum you must learn to be zen about these things. (Or take a photography class. Which I did, once, a long time ago-it did not go well).

This latest shiny thing is a coupon organizer that I made for myself. The front cover says "bon coupon" which is stupid and funny and reminds me of delicious mustard. I deliberately made it so it would not be easy to read. Even though I am rabidly frugal, carrying coupons around the store makes me feel frumpy so I liked the idea of whimsically disguising my little book this way :)

I made the cover by gluing some cardstock letters to another piece of cardstock, covering it all with aluminum foil tape and then burnishing. It's hard to see in the picture but the letters are nice and 3 dimensional in real life. Then I bradded (word? not a word? I don't know but I like it) the nameplate to a piece of deckle cut white cardstock.

I put a little pocket inside the front cover to hold my grocery list, I like to use index cards for my lists and the pocket is cut to fit the 3"x5" size. I punched another piece of cardstock with a cute edge and glued it inside the pocket to make a little cover flap. A little scoring and the flap stays closed just fine, but I might re-address this later and add a closure. I couldn't think of anything at the time so left it plain.



I made my organizer a little different than the ones that you normally see. It fits me and my system better to organize my coupons by store, so I made a pocket for each store that I use coupons at, for a total of six. I only use a few coupons at each store so I didn't need any further way of organizing them (i.e. putting them in groups like dairy, canned goods, etc. is overkill for me!). I made nameplates using the technique that I made the cover with, but used different letters. I stuck them on with a little double stick tape and some more brads.

W*Mart. Because close enough is good enough in the heat of the moment.

After much fussing over details I bound the whole thing together using my Bind-it-All and some 3/4" o-wire.

I used store bought pre-cut letters, cardstock, cereal boxes, brads, some aluminum foil tape and a little piece of o-wire for my book, so it's construction was pretty frugal. I did use some tools like the bind-it-all, my sizzix embosser and circle die cutter, but you could get a similar product using a hole punch and some ribbon to bind it all together. And I barely used the embosser and the circle cutter--I covered two of the tabs on the folders because I cut them kind of funny. Don't tell anyone.

It's really fancy compared to what I used to use (a bunch of tattered envelopes labeled with a sharpie!) but I am sorta in love with it.

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