I've been trying hard recently to not hold on desperately to craft supplies as if I have the last known supply on planet Earth.  It seems that a several years ago, in the early days of blogging, there was a huge emphasis on buying and stockpiling supplies.  I'm glad to see that those days  have gone by, and people are more inspired by their own ideas than, for example, a cute imported Japanese fabric.

In the past year, I've worked through a lot of the things I've been hoarding, and I even let my children get in on the fun occasionally.  One recent Friday afternoon we pulled out a cache of vintage schools supplies I purchased at our school's rummage sale a few years ago and we decided to make collages on chipboard with them.  You'll have to pardon the photo quality, we shot them in our basement craft room which has a fair amount of fluorescent lighting.  We had a ball making these and it was interesting to see how we each used the materials. 

 
Lucie is a prolific artist, she creates it freely and my house is often littered with her drawings. She made 10 or more collages, with not a single thought about conserving materials. (I have to admit to cringing a little when she used all of those flat wooden blocks)

 

Elliot is my literal guy, all of his collages turned into signs, one for each of us, including the pets.  We even repurposed some colorful strings from one of the games to make these into door hangers for each of our bedrooms.

 

The arrangement on mine was very carefully considered, with lots of straight lines, hidden details, and unfortunately not as much spontanaeity as my children.

What do you have squirreled away that you should be using?  What are you waiting for?