Five Dollar Decor: Upcycling

This post was supposed to go up on Friday, but automated posting failed me, so here it is now!

"Upcycling" is a word I love. It has a nice ring to it, and is my favorite example of modern word invention. We aren't merely recycling something. Oh no. We are taking it and elevating it. We are upcycling.

One man's trash is another man's awesome oil lamp.

But, when you get down to brass tacks, upcycling just means "taking something and making it somehow awesomer," doesn't it? Exactly. And nothing could be more appropriate for the theme of "Five Dollar Decor" than taking things you already own and turning them into new things.

Five Dollar Decor: Wreaths

Fall, for some reason, always feels to me like the beginning of wreath season. Perhaps because when I was growing up, hanging a wreath was part of the late-fall preparation for Advent and Christmas. Perhaps because trick-or-treating meant seeing a lot of doors and a lot of wreaths. Whatever the reason, I think about wreaths most when the days start to get shorter and the weather starts to get colder.

Coffee filter wreath by Craftberry Bush

It's hard for me sometimes to find wreaths that I like. Too much clutter or kitsch and I'm instantly turned off. But a lot of people are out there finding ways to make beautiful wreaths with not a lot of clutter for not a lot of money.

Wooden Dice

I am really excited about this project idea from The 36th Avenue. Mr. Scrimp and I love games of all kinds, and I think a couple of oversized, antiqued wooden dice would make a great piece of decor for our living room.

Aren't those great? I love the wood grain and the distressing. They'd be wonderful on a corner table, or perhaps as bookends!

Wood Dice Tutorial via Dollar Store Crafts

Project: Dixie Cup DIY Garland

I am totally in love with this dixie cup garland from Hey Gorgeous. It's so pretty! And I LOVE Christmas lights--I bought a few strings the year we got married and am constantly moving them around the house and putting them up places all year round. Who says white lights are just for Christmas?

One of the things I love most about this project is that it is totally customizable to match your own personal style and color preferences. Because the cups are covered with scrapbook paper, you can go as wild and crazy--or as conservative--as you want. I'm thinking a series of bright mustard yellows with some grays or brick reds thrown in.

Dixie Cups are cheap. I actually have a mostly-unused package sitting around that need to be used up. I think it's time to pick up some cheap scrapbook paper.

Alternatively: Recycle wrapping paper, tissue paper, newspaper, brown paper shopping bags, or magazines instead of buying scrapbook paper.

DIY Dixie Cup Garland tutorial via Pinterest

DIY Chandelier Project

Do you love that mid-century look for home decorating? Or maybe you prefer something a little more homespun than that? Now you can highlight either look with a fun, cheap DIY chandelier project, courtesy of Young House Love.

I am in love with this project! For the price of some inexpensive wire mesh and a couple packages of clothespins, you can install a cool, unique chandelier in your home. The example above went into a laundry room (very appropriate) but I can think of several places in my home where I'd like to put something like this.

Head on over to Young House Love and check it out!

Menu Planner

I really like to have meals planned out advance, even if it's just something like "chicken on this day, beef on that day," et cetera.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I saw this awesome menu planner tutorial. I included both the first one I found, at our perfectly imperfect life, and the one that inspired that, at Thirty Handmade Days.

As you can see, the menu planner (made of a decorated cork board) uses clips for each day so that meals can be rearranged on a weekly basis. It features envelopes for recipe cards and to hold a selection of meal choices to be pinned up.

I think this is such a cool idea, especially if you can find a cork board secondhand where it often costs only a couple of dollars. And, of course, there's no end to the styles or colors you can use. The only limit is your imagination and your materials.

Guest Post: Magazines

Today's offering for all of you is a guest post by my childhood best friend and scrimpy pal, Emma, who writes a great little blog called Simple Pleasures. Be sure to visit her and give her some love once you're done reading about this fun project she did!

Busy Bee

So, I have a history of making impulsive decisions and then immediately following through on them because I'm too impatient to wait, and by wait I mean "stop, think it over, and make a plan."

By and large, this has worked out for me. I feel like my gut  instinct is good. However, I still don't think of this as a particularly great quality about myself because occasionally and eventually it inevitably leads to trouble.

That being said.. this time, I think it's going to be ok.

Link: Shabby Chic Cottage

Mr. Scrimp and I are in the middle of organizing and setting up our spare room to be an office/craft room, after almost eight months of using it for storage (read: piling things up when we don't want to deal with having them in the rest of the house). As a result, all my crafting stuff has been moved from disorganized piles on the floor to semi-organized piles on a shelf and I've been too busy to actually do much crafting.

But... when I do, this is the next project on my list--a rectangular cloth basket, designed by Gina at the Shabby Chic Cottage.

Go here for the how-to.

Link: Valentine's Day Wall Art

I love this Valentine's Day wall art from Secret Pie Shoppe! The whole project was made with nothing but scrapbook paper and a little cardstock--just a few dollars, if you don't have the materials on hand.

You could do this with pretty much any shape and color--squares or circles, hearts, what-have-you.  It definitely isn't limited to a Valentine's Day craft.

Follow the link for a how-to.

Project: Frame It!

Yesterday, while Mr. Scrimp was getting very involved with a new video game, I decided to do a little on-the-fly craft project. Back in October, we'd picked up four $5 black frames at Wal-Mart, hoping they would fit some prints we had on hand. Sadly, they didn't, and I never got around to returning them, so they just sat in a bag in our spare room for months.

Until yesterday!

Saturday!

Oh my gosh--this is my 100th post in this blog since October. That isn't a ton, but it's still a milestone and I feel good about it.

Sadly, it's going to be a short and pretty unmemorable post. I have spent my day doing crafty things and redecorating our mantel. There are pictures, but Mr. Scrimp and I are about to run out the door to a friend's birthday party, so I don't have time to download them off the camera just yet. Look for them tonight or tomorrow morning, along with instructions for copying my project.

Happy Saturday, friends!

Project: Apothecary Jar

I am in love with apothecary  jars. Actually, I'm pretty much in love with all decorative jars. Unfortunately, the nice ones (like the three Pottery Barn jars shown here on the left) can be very expensive--starting between $40 and $60 apiece.

This weekend, after months of sighing and ogling and envying, I decided to jump on the bandwagon, imitate a project I've seen done various ways all over the Internet lately, and make my own darn jar. It was incredibly easy, and incredibly quick.

I spent roughly five minutes on this project, four and a half of which were waiting for my glue gun to warm up. Total cost? $2.

Pictures and instructions after the jump.

Five Dollar Decor - Cardboard

Today, I'd like to talk about cardboard.

Mr. Scrimp and I have an entire closet that is filled from top to bottom with cardboard boxes from moving. We can't bring ourselves to throw them away (I have packrat tendencies). After all, the cardboard is perfectly good, and if we don't use it for a project, we'll need it again eventually anyway.

Well, I think it's time to break into the closet, because I've put together a list of some really great ways to use cardboard in your home.

Most of these involve a fair amount of DIY effort from you, but if you're like me, cardboard is going to cost you nothing because you have already accumulated so darn much of it. So it's a fair trade-off, I think.

Project: Five Minute Wall Decor

We're having unseasonably warm weather here, but it's still wet and gray. In order to add a splash of color to one of our bare walls, I whipped up this little project based on an idea I saw a while back at Dollar Store Crafts. I kid you not, it took me less time to complete the project and hang the finished result than to write this entire blog post.

Link: Custom Fabric at Spoonflower

I was browsing around the other day and came across Spoonflower, a company that lets users upload their own fabric patterns and prints them on organic cotton. Previous patterns are available for sale and there are some really, really beautiful and unique fabrics there.

It's pricey--ranging from $18 to $20 a yard, with 8x8" swatches going for $5 and fat quarters going for $11. Still, if you find something you really adore, a swatch or fat quarter is enough for a smallish project where it's a trim or a feature in a larger piece. Perhaps the center of a pillow or cushion, or the front panel on a purse or reusable shopping bag?

Even if it's not in your price range, go browse around for a few minutes just for the sheer enjoyment of the artistry in some of the patterns.

DIY Modular Bookshelf

I think one of the hardest things about apartment living is finding enough space to store your things. At least in the apartments I've lived in (and the ones my friends have lived in), it seems like there's just never enough closet space or shelving to hold the things that get collected over a year or two or three of just living. Someone gives you something, and it's great, but where on earth are you going to put it? Bookshelves are surprisingly expensive and it's tough to find the time to actually make something.

But I did find a project on Craftynest.com that looks like it would be a doable weekend project for not too much money--and you get a great bookshelf at the end!

This set of modular shelves was made from a salvaged pile of mismatched drawers that were painted, papered, and affixed to the wall with screws. Depending on where you find the drawers (you might even get lucky and pick something up on Freecycle), you can get pretty varied results, I think--all the same size, or, as in this photo from the Craftynest project, various sizes and shapes that are joined together by color.

As soon as I find some drawers, I'm definitely giving this a shot. We have an entire room worth of stuff that is simply sitting in boxes because we don't have shelves to put it on.

Link to the full project instructions is here.

Textiles

tex-tile. [teks-tahyl]
-noun
1.  any cloth or goods produced by weaving, knitting, or felting.
2. a material, as a fiber or yarn, used in or suitable for weaving


I love textiles. I love to sew, knit, crochet, spin--even weave, although I haven't done it in years and years and years.

When I first learned how to knit and crochet, pretty much the only thing I could do was make, well, useless things. I was really good at crochetig long chains, and knitting mysterious lumpy triangles that never achieved the shape I wanted them to. Over time, I graduated to scarves and the occasional hat (once I learned how to crochet in a circle). I can follow patterns.. mostly.

I can crochet like the wind. Sadly, I can't knit that way, and so I rarely do any knitting because it takes so long to make any progress, especially with the kinds of projects that interest me. My goal this year is to knit a sweater, but I feel like there's a pretty good chance it won't happen.

Still, there are lovely things out there that you can make by knitting or crocheting, and I do occasionally get some knitting done. I have made many halves of socks, and a couple of fingerless gloves, and a scarfy-shruggy thing that I never wear because I was just making it for practice.

I was going to post a pattern for a really cute crocheted scarf that I found on craftster.com, but then I realized--you know, there are probably a lot of people out there on the Internet who can't knit or crochet. And that's a shame, because in this day of do-it-yourself, reusing, upcycling, and movement away from blatant consumerism, it's a skill that should be cultivated.

So instead, I'm going to suggest that those of you who don't know how to knit or crochet learn how to do one or the other. The starting materials are cheap--even Wal-Mart sells knitting needles, crochet hooks, and cheap acrylic yarn. It's not an expensive hobby to learn. You don't even need to buy a book! The internet is full of instructions on how to do all sorts of crafty things, and these two skills are no exception.

Lion Brand Yarns has an entire website of crochet instructions, which will teach you everything you need to know to get going. (NB: Lion Brand also recently put ALL of their patterns up on their website for free. That's right, free. What better time to learn how to use them?)

Then there is the fabulous website, Knitting How To, which has instructional videos for both knitting and crochet, as well as small projects to get started with.

If you are a visual learner and not happy with the videos you find there, YouTube is full of them, and google would probably turn up more.

I've taught myself all sorts of things using internet tutorials like this--most recently, how to cable knit, which I thought was going to be really difficult, but which turned out in fact to be fabulously easy.

And once you've learned, or if you are already proficient and yawning over this blog post, you can go become a member at Ravelry.com. Here you can create a profile, find patterns written by other members or published by companies, post updates on your progress, read reviews of patterns, and more.

(Photo Credit: Lion Brand website)

Bedroom Sign Project

So, although I rarely end up posting them here on Scrimpalicious for some reason, I do a fair amount of crafting and sewing projects--which is one of the reasons I started the blog in the first place.

Today, I decided to put together a Christmas present for my six-year-old nephew. "Homemade" has sort of been our gift theme this year, so I really wanted to come up with something that was designed especially for him, and ended up with this chalkboard sign for his bedroom door--sorry the picture's so terrible. I can't find my camera and had to use my cellphone.

It took about 30 minutes to make. I picked up a chalkboard in the wood crafts section at JoAnn fabrics, along with a small painted wooden bomb, comic book "pow" explosion graphic, and the stars you see in the upper right hand corner, and some red Mickey Mouse alphabet stickers.

I painted the chalkboard in a comic book yellow with acrylic paint, hot-glued the wood shapes on (I glued the "pow" on top of the bomb to add a little bit of comic-book action to the sign), and spelled his name out with the stickers. I didn't worry too too much about lining the letters up perfectly, to give them a slightly more comic-booky feel.

I varnished the whole thing (except the chalkboard part, of course) with three coats of satin varnish, and hot-glued a string to the back for hanging. I also picked up some chalk and a chalkboard eraser to go with it.

This was a lot of fun and turned out looking great. I think it would also be a super project to do with a kid for their own room.

Celebrating Ingenuity

More than just about anything else craft-related in this world, I covet a dress form. I'm not kidding--I lie around and daydream about the far-off day when I have the $300 to spend on one. On that day, every sewing project I undertake will be different. I will be able to fit things--fit things, I tell you--that I am making for myself. I will be able to drape fabrics. The possibilities for what I will be able to do will be endless.

Sadly, it is going to be a long, long time before I have that kind of discretionary spending.

If you're like me, you've been nodding your head in sad acknowledgment as you read this. Well, nod sadly no more, my friends. Blogger MJ over at Making Do with the Not So New has come up with a solution. When she wanted a dress form in order to fit clothes for a squirmy toddler, she didn't throw up her hands and whimper about the cost. Oh no, she did something about it, and made a dress form out of duct tape and scrap fabric!

Now, if you're going to do this for yourself, you are going to need someone to help you, because it involves close wrapping of the body with duct tape. Happily, Mr. Scrimp is the type who will think this is hilarious and I shouldn't have too much trouble talking him into swathing me in duct tape from the neck down, especially if it means I no longer drag him into the sewing section at our local JoAnn Fabrics to sigh over dressmaker's dummies.

You can find the tutorial here. If you do it before I get it finished and posted about, please comment or email me and let me know. I'm intensely curious to know if this is really as easy as it looks.