Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Fall Decorating on the Cheap: Fall Button Art

 



Welcome to my last installment of fall decorating on the cheap. You can find my previous posts here:
The goal of this exercise has been to use only the materials I have and not spend any money. I feel like I’m on Craft Wars and have to make fall decor using only certain materials. Of course, I don’t have the Michael’s craft closet at my disposal, so it really is nothing like Craft Wars.

I recently discovered a gallon sized Ziploc bag full of buttons while cleaning out my garage. I didn’t know I even had them. I must have bought them a few years ago, and they got buried under the hoards of clutter in my garage. So, I thought it would be a good idea to use them for a fall project.

I wanted to make pictures of fall items like pumpkins or candy corn with the buttons. However, as I started to go rummage through them, I realized that I had ten tons of pink and purple buttons but very few orange. It was obvious I wouldn’t have enough of the right colors to accomplish what I wanted.

You can’t really tell in the pictures, but I actually used acrylic paint to color a few of the buttons the way I wanted. Hooray for getting things done! 

I painted another ugly frame that I had bought this summer at a yard sale. My plan was to use the off white burlap fabric as a background in the frame, but that was a disaster.  I opted for using scrapbook paper instead. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any. So, I used this great website and printed my own. I created the matte with cardboard paper and covered it with the orange quatrefoil paper using mod podge. I put the green chevron paper behind that.  

I glued the buttons to the paper in a pumpkin shape and used a cute bead as the stem.


While I think it’s cute, the matte is not quite cut straight and the patterns are a little crooked. But, you won’t be able to tell too much from my mantle. Also, while I have a ton of buttons in my craft stash, many people don’t. While this was cheap for me, it may not be for others. However, you could use your imagination and replace the buttons with spray painted washers or some other building material everyone has lying around.  

I hope you have enjoyed my fall decorating on the cheap! Let me know what you think.       

Next up will be my little munchkin’s Halloween costume!



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Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Fall Decorating on the Cheap: Happy Fall Y’all Pumpkin Blocks


Welcome to another installment of fall decorating on the cheap. You can find my previous posts here:

I’ve been trying to decorate for fall using only the materials I have on hand. The hubby and I just attended our third class in Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, and we’ve done quite well so far with getting our budget in order. However, my eyebrows look atrocious since I’ve decided not to pay to have them waxed any longer, and I’m far from proficient when it comes to using the tweezers on them myself. Another problem is that I haven’t been able to spend ANY money on fall decorations. I’ve had to dig deep and really get creative. 
One thing I’ve seen a lot recently is pumpkin blocks made from things like 2x4s. I have a little bit of scrap wood at the house, so I decided to give it a try.
I found this piece of wood in my shed and cut it into three pieces. I used acrylic paint to paint each piece orange. Most of the pumpkin blocks I’ve seen have been covered in scrapbook paper. However, I have no fall scrapbook paper, so I used my penmanship and wrote “Happy Fall Y’all” on the pieces of wood with a brown paint marker. I then sanded each piece to give it a rustic or unfinished look, whatever you want to call it.
I embellished each pumpkin with wine cork I had cut down and green ribbon, which I glued on the top with a glue gun. I was happy with the way it turned out. I think it adds a nice touch to my fall décor, and it didn’t cost me a cent. Also, I could probably find a piece of scrap wood on the side of the road on trash day if I didn’t have any on hand. That could possibly be where I got the one I used. It’s amazing what you can come up with when you have very little to work with. Let me know what you think!









   




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