Pocket Dumpster

Do you have any idea how many pockets are on a pair of ABUs? If you do laundry for someone who wears them (and are therefore responsible for checking all of the pockets for pens, watches, knives, money, etc.) you would probably say way more than necessary. The actual answer is 14 in case you were wondering, although that's not including the occasional pocket within a pocket.

Anyway, Hubs has lots of pockets so he has lots of stuff to dump out of said pockets when he gets home. Alas, after being here for over a year we hadn't really established a good place for all of that stuff. That occassionally led to panic at 7:30 the next morning when some random doodad had walked off and was nowhere to be found. The desk was an ok dumping ground, but who really wants 14 pockets worth of stuff on their desk everyday?

Enter crafty wife who doesn't like to panic and search for a reflective belt at 7:30am. I had an old hanging jewelry organizer that wasn't being used (and was recently moved out of the Goodwill pile to the infamous "almost Goodwill but I decided to save it for a project" pile).

It took me a minute to figure out what fabric to use. Obviously anything floral or polka dotty was completely out of the question. It would've been cool to use the same fabric as his ABUs, but none of his uniforms are worn out to the point that I would cut them up and those things are expensive! So I found a pair of pants in THE pile (you know the one I'm talking about).

They're a dark brownish black herringbone, sorry for the terrible picture. After some seam ripping I had all of my pieces ready to go. Except the trim on the jewelry organizer was plastic-y white and generally just looked terrible on the pants. So I cut some little pieces to sew over the edges.

If you happen to try something similar and you haven't used vinyl before just keep in mind that if you poke a hole in it, the hole will be there forever. I didn't like sewing the vinyl very much since minimal pinning = stuff shifting around a lot. I used the hem of one of the pant legs to make the loops for hanging.

Certainly not the prettiest thing I've ever created, but I'm hoping it's usefulness will make it awesome despite it's homely appearance.

And I know I could've made fabric baskets faster, but that would defeat the whole get-things-off-the-desk purpose. And I could've used fabric instead of vinyl for the pockets, but Hubs wanted to be able to see what he was grabbing. I know this post probably won't help a ton of people out there, but if you've ever washed a uniform you can at least sympathize with the ridiculous number of pockets. Seriously...14?