Five Dollar Decor - Celebrating Nature

Every Friday, I'll be posting Five Dollar Decor--five ideas for interior decorating that can be achieved by spending only five dollars. For five dollars, you can add one new element to your in-home design. For twenty-five, you can revamp an entire room around a new theme. Hmm... a trip to Starbucks, or a weekend redecorating project?

Well, another week is gone, and it's time for the weekend. If you're like me and someone who loves you gave you a subscription to Martha Stewart Living at some point, you have seen the ridiculous amounts of greenery that litter her home(s). Well, I have plants in my house, but I can't afford two dozen houseplants to put in my Indoor Garden Corner Nook Thing, or whatever she calls it.

That being said, I am a huge nature lover, and I would love to theme a room around the things I find most beautiful in the natural world.

1. Framed Faux Foliage

Ok, I'll cop to getting a little carried away with the alliteration there. This idea comes from The Red Chair Blog via Dollar Store Crafts. Once again, you may need to dig around to find a frame that keeps this project under $5 for you--but then again, you may not. It depends on the scale you're going for.
 
I recommend tea-staining the paper you mount the foliage on in order to get the antiqued look that is so popular over at Design*Sponge. Or, you could borrow a page from their book and try more creative backgrounds--why not brown paper, from the back of a grocery bag, or leftover scrapbook paper, or wallpaper? The sky's the limit. If you live in an area where location and weather aren't conspiring against you, you can of course make the project even cheaper (but less instantly gratifying) by using real foliage.

Alternatively, you could splurge on some paint and antique the silk flowers, or paint them some color other than green, or use them as stencils. When you're done, hang them in groups, as in this photo from TheNest.com.

2. Laboratory Garden

Your $5 here is going to be spent at the dollar store or the thrift store, where a little digging will pretty easily find you five glass vases--narrow and cylindrical, or, if you can find them, the stranger and more bulbous shapes that are reminiscent of a steampunk mad scientist's lab.

Head outside--even if you live in the city, you should be able to pull this off. Right now it's November, and I live in the land of the Lake Effect, so greenery is getting sparse, but it would be just as lovely to fill these with tall, stripped branches or boughs of berries. In the winter, you could change it up and stick some evergreens in there or something. In the spring, early flowers and greenery could take over, and in the summer you could do anything that grows, of course.

Cluster the vases on a side table, or spread them out along a larger table or mantel.


3. Branch Hooks

I'm going to be getting together with my husband and seeing about putting together a photo tutorial for this, because we want some for our house. You can purchase these for about $40 a pop from Live Wire Farm, or you can make your own with some carefully chosen branches, a power drill, and a couple of screws. (via Haute Nature)

4. Stones

This article in Country Living, of all places, suggests filling two large glass jars--one with stones, and one with blown eggs. I'm not sure I would do the eggs, because country living isn't exactly the aesthetic I go for when it comes to decorating, but you can go pretty crazy with stones. Fill a jar with small rocks from your front yard. Take a day trip out to the country and dig up a giant flat stone to put on your coffee table. Make a centerpiece of river rocks (which you can buy by the bag at some dollar stores). It's quick, it's simple, and it's beautiful.

A google image search revealed some beautiful photos by people who have done something along these lines. I'm sharing my favorite, which came from EcoSalon.


5. Leaf Mobile

By and large, I associate mobiles with babies. You know, they hang over a crib. That's where they go.

Well, yeah, if they're made of felt and have clowns on them, they do.

I'm using the term "mobile" here loosely. I'm not suggesting you sit down and spend your weekend going crazy making something that spins around in the wind or anything like that. My aunt once made a much simpler version (and I wish I had a photo) by stringing fall leaves on fishing line and attaching each line individually to the ceiling with a thumbtack. The leaves were staggered so that as you walk into the room it looks as though, hovering above the table, someone had frozen autumn leaves in time as they were in the process of falling.

You could do it that way, over a dining room or coffee table. You could string them up against a wall as an art piece. You could get crazy and cover an entire wall with strings of leaves.



I know that a lot of these ideas might not be up your alley. It's really, really, really easy to overdo decor in this theme and end up with some sort of messy, cluttered, "rustic" look, and I hate that. So while I might not implement all five of these ideas in one room, I would happily scatter all five throughout my home.