Five Dollar Decor: Maps

I have a longstanding love affair with maps. I particularly like the pretty antique ones, but the ones pulled from the atlas are just as good, if you ask me. I like to look at them. I like to think about them. I just like having them around. They are cool. I am a map enthusiast.

I would do this

And you know who else was obsessed with maps? Winston Churchill. So you can wipe that condescending look off your face, smartypants. Maps are awesome.

I haven't done all of the projects in this week's Five Dollar Decor post, but I think I can honestly say that is only because I don't have the time to do all the projects I want to do. Someday, though. Someday.

Five Dollar Decor - Child's Room

I've been remiss lately with the Five Dollar Decor posts, I admit. You'd be surprised how tough it can be to come up with ideas when there's nothing that I find immediately inspiring.

I still wasn't terribly inspired when I chose this theme, but I got more and more excited as I went, and now I'm really sad that it hasn't got any applicability for Mr. Scrimp and I at this time.

We don't have kids of our own yet, but I started working in childcare around the same time I started high school and have been doing it ever since. Babysitting, nannying, teaching preschool--you name it, I've done it. If I ever teach preschool again, I'll use these ideas in my classroom. If not, I'll use them when Mr. Scrimp and I manage to successfully make a Tiny Scrimp. Scrimpette? Mini-Scrimp? Well, the point is, someday we'll have one, and I will be ready.

Five Dollar Decor: Framed Art

One of the things that I find makes a home feel most finished is hanging framed artwork on the walls. I don't even care what's in the frames, really--there's just something about one or two or twenty(!) frames, neatly hung, that says a place is lived in by someone who cares about their surroundings.

Thing is, framed artwork--if you just buy it--is really expensive, especially when you get into bigger pieces.

So, what you should do instead is make it!

Recipe: Challah

Although my family has a Jewish background, I was raised Christian, but in spite of not being a traditionally observant Jew (although I do celebrate the big holidays), I am trying to learn how to observe some kind of sabbath.

I really love to make challah. I've recently started a goal of trying to make a loaf every Friday morning, since Fridays are a late-start day for me and I don't need to go to work until 1. That way, we have fresh bread for the weekend and something special to eat on Saturdays.

This recipe takes me about two hours, from getting out the ingredients to taking the finished loaf out of the oven to cool. It's not as sweet as a traditional challah, but we like it that way because it means we can use it for sandwiches without getting a weird overly-sweetness to it, but can also sweeten it up with a bit of honey and butter, or with jelly.

I will say, I am generally afraid of trying kneaded, yeasty breads because I have had a lot of past experiences where what I got was a heavy, dry, crumbly loaf of flavorless blah... but this recipe so far has always turned out well for me, very elastic with few crumbs.

Five Dollar Decor - Arts & Crafts Style

So, Mr. Scrimp and I were trying to figure out a good five dollar decor topic. We couldn't come up with one for the longest time, and then it hit me! Instead of talking about five variations on one thing--wall coverings, or whatever--what if I looked at five things you can add to or change about a room to make it feel more like a certain style of decor?

So this week, I dug up five things that you can do to make a room feel more Arts & Crafts. Now, when I say Arts & Crafts, I'm not talking about the thing you do with fingerpaint and popsicle sticks in kindergarten. No, I'm referring to the design movement pioneered by William Morris and John Ruskin at the turn of the century.

Think early Tiffany lamps, Stickley furniture, Frank Lloyd Wright, exposed wood beams, simple fabrics, geometric patterns, and leaded glass. The key here is simplicity. You should be able to replicate all of the following things for five dollars each.

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.

Five Dollar Decor - Tape

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 proje

Geeks, mechanics, theater people, and college students the world around know the value of a good piece of tape. I use tape way more than I should, probably, but I can't help it. It has everything going for it--it's sticky, it's decorative (if used properly), it's versatile, it's cheap.

Today, I'd like to feature five decorative uses of regular old tape. Prepare to have your mind blown.

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.

Five Dollar Decor - Books

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?

 
My husband and I both majored in English, and have a soft spot in our hearts for books. Generally we're both pretty opposed to any sort of decorating that involves destroying a book, but these are so gorgeous that I decided to link to them anyway. Depending on the project, you could use a cheap copy of your favorite book (I've been able to find most of mine for less than $1.50 at Half.com), a dollar store romance novel, a comic book, or something else you have just lying around.

1. Wall Covering

We live in an apartment and can't paint or paper our walls, but you could cover an accent wall with individual pages of a book for a beautiful and unique look using nothing but sticky-tack.(Photo and inspiration from Frolic)

There are several ways to mix this idea up. Instead of covering an entire wall, you could just put up blocks of pages instead of framed artwork. If you have some ink and rubber stamps, you could stamp a page here and there. Or you could do a light watercolor or acrylic wash over some of the pages to scatter in some pops of color.

2. Floating Shelf

This one appeals to me, because as many books as I might use up for decorating, I will still have more left over and we never have enough shelf space. This creates a shelf out of a book, creating an illusion of floating books on your wall.

Design from Instructables 

3. Flying Book Art

The photo here comes from an in-store display at Anthropologie, and was taken by Casasugar. Here, covers were removed from old books, they were glued together, individual pages were folded down in a repeating design, and the books were hung by the ceiling by the holes in the centers.

You could do this, or, if you didn't want to remove the cover, you could simply fit the opened book over a length of rope or ribbon and fold or roll the pages to keep it open as it hangs. Great for an office, reading nook, or kid's bedroom.


4. Framed Books

Want some nice artwork for your walls, but too broke to purchase any and unwilling to actually destroy a whole book to make your own? Why not borrow an idea from Good Housekeeping and put your book in a shadow box? Craft stores regularly run huge sales on frames, and you can also check thrift stores for nice frames that you can salvage (usually the art is appalling; try to visualize the frame without that awful oil painting of the Easter Bunny). 

If you can't find a shadow box and book together within the $5 budget, and don't want to bump your spending up by a few dollars, you could imitate the aesthetic this project by simply attaching the book to the wall (although this will involve damaging it a little) and hanging an open frame around it.

5. Book Wreath

The fifth and last Five Dollar Decor idea for this week  is actually a wreath made of book pages, with photos and instructions by Living With Lindsay. I'm not actually a big wreath person myself, but if you are, I think you'll dig this one.

This could be made in multiple sizes, and even multiple shapes. If you already have a room decorated in a books-and-paper theme, this could be a great finishing touch.



And that's all for this week's Five Dollar Decor. Happy weekend!