Jodi Levine Transforms Everyday Items Into Works of Magic

Jodi Levine describes herself as a lifelong crafter. As a young girl, she would sneak paper doilies off the dinner table and hoarded tissue boxes, toilet paper rolls, straws, and the cardboard inserts that came in shirts, stockings, and gloves. She would then transform her stash into paper plate clocks, and make paper straw necklaces with her friends for birthday parties.

“When I look back at my childhood I realize that my path in the craft and lifestyle world was pretty much set from the start,” she admitted in an interview with Mom Filter. “I loved making things and was always hoarding cardboard and other materials for crafts, planning parties and decorating for holidays. I pored over every women’s or lifestyle magazine that my mom bought and made a series of tiny, strange fashion and food magazines.”

This passion continued, and after graduating from RISD (where she studied painting) she found a perfect job in the Craft Department at Martha Stewart Living, where she worked for over 19 years.

Her job? Transforming everyday items into works of magic. Based in Brooklyn with her husband Fred and two sons, Sammy and Lionel, she has made an Elizabethan princess costume out of coffee filters, a parking garage for kids made entirely of toilet paper and paper towel tubes and cardboard boxes, and even her own wedding flowers made from crepe paper.

“I’m not sure that becoming a parent shaped my choice of work,” she says. “I always loved creating crafts for kids and pushed for doing the kids magazine at Martha Stewart way before I had kids. I do, however, think that the ideas that I came up with after becoming a parent, whether for kid’s crafts, birthday parties or recipes, were much much simpler!”

Follow her Instagram page for a pop of inspiration.