When Boredom Strikes

  It has been a busy few days with the yard looking like a rain forest from the overgrowth of vines and bushes and the house beginning to resemble a flea market with boxes of stuff being packed to move to Darling Daughter's new home.  Even with all this busyness, I was beginning to feel a bit bored.  Little time has been allotted for crafts much less any sort of relaxation.  I knew this boredom was going to lead somewhere but I had no idea which direction.

  As my daughter is unpacking her belongings, she is also discarding things that do not match her decor.  Well, that is fine and dandy except that they get "discarded" to my house and I cannot leave well enough alone.  I wish I would have taken a "before" picture of the most awful looking hat rack that she so sweetly discarded my way.  It was one of those things that was popular back a few years when everything was coming up roses.  For some reason for a while, rose decor was all the rage.  I like roses...just not painted on everything from teapots to chairs...and surely not on hat racks. The hat rack was supposed to resemble a window frame that was repurposed into a useful item.  It had three "panes" (pains!) that were painted with some odd looking roses. That thing was, well for lack of a better word, ugly! That is when inspiration struck!  Halloween!

  Halloween is the time when you can take ugly, unwanted items and turn them into the most adorable decorations.  A little black paint does wonders on most anything!  It did on the hat rack.  What was once a weird creamy white "chippy" paint was smeared (literally smeared!) with a coat of flat black. I did not want this to look like some factory painted doodad.  The "panes" were then painted off white and Halloween inspired silhouettes were painted in each. I found the inspiration for these by doing a computer search for just that....Halloween silhouettes.  Since there is not a lot of detail in this type thing, I did not even draw the pictures...just painted.

Repurposing an old hat rack.  It once had pink roses painted on it but now..Halloween!!!

  I do think the hat rack is much improved.  So much so that I can now hardly wait until mid-September gets here!  Yep, I do decorate early for Halloween but it is just because of things like this hat rack...and boredom!  Moral of this tale...never throw away a good hat rack!  Turn it into a Halloween decoration!  You just cannot go wrong like that!  Ooooh!  Halloween!

"Abandoning" the Little Bayou House!

Recycling or reusing just keeps getting better and better.  With the upcoming "Ultimate Clue Hunt" a little less than a month away, it is getting down to crunch time.  Although we have most of the larger props made, there are still a few details that need to be remedied.  One such thing it the decorating of the Little Bayou House.  Since this is to be held early in October, I decided to forego the usual Fall/Halloween decorations and just let the clue hunt decor suffice.  The back-story that I wrote deals with a good bit of the Coastal lore set back in the late 1800s.  Now..fast-forward to present day. The solvers of the quest will be trying to unravel a mystery set long ago.  The house was locked up tight and left just as it was.  Over the years, it has fallen in disrepair and has acquired that "abandoned house" appearance.  Imagine that!  A house that no one has entered for over a hundred years that looks abandoned!  So I have my work cut out for me.  I have to fully abandon the Little Bayou House but still live here.  Hmmm?  This should be interesting.  Also, their quest must be tackled without any "modern day" conveniences..no lights (other than a few back lights or lanterns) , electronics or even running water.

This afternoon after finishing my chores, I set to work creating a large flower arrangement that has died. Yep, flowers do not stay fresh and pretty for long without water!  Not wanting to use the normal route and go buy silk flowers for this decoration, I opted to recycle.  I figured that most of the petals would have dry-rotted by this time anyway so I thought a lovely bouquet of sticks might be nice!  I wanted something that would cast lots of weird shadows on the wall behind the bouquet.  This was to go behind a bed that sits catty-cornered in what used to be my daughter's bedroom.  It is now the main character's bedroom.  I pondered the situation and came up with the idea of using some old artificial berry stalks that at one time were Christmas decorations.  They had definitely see better days!  The stalks were peeling their outer paper and the berries (Styrofoam) were squished and most were missing.  I had already tossed these on the discard pile!  They were most perfect!  I toted them outside to do a major overhaul on them!  With a little black paint daubed here and there, the berries began to look quite old..and dead!  Oh..and it is really hard to paint something so springy so I opted for the old "hit and miss" technique!  Having no (eco-harsh) spray paint on hand, the brush had to do.  This did knock off a bunch more berries but I merely wired them back in place as best I could.  The cruddier and more battered they became, the more I liked them!

It was while I was painting berry vines, that I smugly thought of how I was helping "save" the world by recycling these things once again.  I bought them seventeen years ago and used them for most everything!  Now, new life...errr...death(?)..was being breathed back into them!  I was eager to see how my arrangement looked.  Then I noticed something a tad strange.  My berry vines had words!  Yep, it seems that way back years ago, recycling was in vogue!  Whatever company made the decorations had recycled newspapers as the filler for the vines!  Wow!  I wish I could read some of those papers!  It was obvious that the newspapers had been put through a shredder then the strips were wrapped around wire.  Finally an outer layer of tissue paper gave the nice brown color!  My berry vines were now recycled for the third time!  Aww, I felt really good about hanging on to the berry vines for all of these years.  Painted black, these decorations have another few years of worth in them as Halloween decorations.  And to think...I have a nice, dead arrangement for just a few pennies worth of paint!

For the arrangement, I added some dried grasses and two stalks of (some sort of) plant that came in a floral arrangement that Mark got me for our anniversary back in March.  I dried them and now those, too, are recycled!  With a little back-lighting, shadows were cast on the wall with satisfaction!  Pretty creepy!  The arrangement looks sufficiently...umm..old!

I am Green!

My sweet daughter-in-law, Joanna, once told me that I was the "Greenest" person she knew.  For a moment I was a tad concerned as the term was new to me.  After a bit of explaining from her, I understood and well, to be honest, had to agree.  I did not realize that I was being "Green"..I just thought I was doing the right thing by Old Mother Earth.  I had no idea at the time that this notion even had a name attached to it.  At the time, she was referring to my method of doing the laundry, my organic gardening (another new name for me!) and  my habit of recycling or upcycling items.  Well, I think I might have reached a new level of this "Green" thing..just a hunch but something tells me that I might be taking this upcycling thing a bit too far!

Mark bought me some more cutting plates for my die-cut machine.  These small flat items were packed and shipped in a rather large box.  The rest of the box was filled with yards and yards of packing paper.  Usually, this is brown paper or unprinted newspaper but this time the paper was the loveliest shade of green!  Before even looking at the cutting plates, my mind was racing with ideas.  The possibilities of this green paper made my head spin!  Michael was sitting there when I opened the box and he snickered at my elation!  "Mom, you are the only person that I know who gets more excited over packing paper than what is in the box."  I informed him that I WAS extremely excited over the cutting plates but the paper was green!  "I can see that." was his only remark.  Hmmm..was I carrying this too far?  Should I just toss this paper in the trash and be done with it?  No way!  I could never do that!  I reuse the ordinary packing papers!  Why would I not do that to this one?

Out came the iron and ironing board and I set to work smoothing the wrinkles from my new art medium!  After I ironed the entire length of paper (twenty-two feet to be exact!), I rolled it for storage.  My brain is still whirring with ideas and as soon as I finish my current three projects, I will be ready to turn this lovely, green paper into some awesome art project!  Now..that is the "Green" way!  There is no way that I am trashing something that can be useful!  Oh...and I do love my new die-cutting plates!

Eensy Weensy Spider!

Ok, so the artsy side of me won out today and the cleaning got waylaid!  Actually, that cleaning is what inspired the bit of creativity!  Going through a box of junk, I came across a funny little wire thing that came off the front of a stereo speaker.  Why I had saved it is beyond my reasoning but we shall mark it up to one of those "I might use it later" pieces!  Here today, I finally made use of it!  Again, this is one of those "made from trash "up-cycle" art projects.  Stuff that should have been tossed long ago but somehow wound up in a box of "use it laters".

I started out by finding the wire speaker cover.  The wheels started turning in the brain...what could I do with this?   Then a plastic spider fell out of the box and liked to scared the bejeebies out of me!  Spider...wire cage thingy....ahhh...wheels were awhirring now!   With only these two, a piece of cardboard from the catfood box and a piece of paper, a project was born!  Well, a pen, some glue and a piece of string also came in handy!

I drew a simple cobweb on the paper and cut it out to the same size as the speaker cover.  I cut a circle from the cardboard in the same size.  The two were glued together.  This became the backing of the project. The plastic spider was hot-glued to the cobweb circle and this was all glued securely to the back of the speaker cover.  I added a hanger to the back.  Which by the way, was made sturdier by poking to holes in a strip of cardboard and lacing the string through the holes.  I knotted the string ends and glued the cardboard strip to the cardboard backing.  This will keep the string from coming unglued!  Pretty smart, eh?   My spider was now encased in a handy-dandy cage!  I turned it over to inspect my handiwork....what?  This will never do!  According to the stereo people that made this speaker cover, my spider was named "Pioneer"!  No!  I shall not have it!  With a little careful cutting and some lettering, my spider was renamed Bob!  (This name was randomly thrown out there by Michael when I asked for suggestions.  Sounded like a good name for a pet spider so Bob was named!)

With Bob now happily residing in his new home, I hung him along with the Halloween group of pictures in the hallway.  When I finish a few more wall hangings, the hallway will be decorated for the holiday!  I do believe I should get back to cleaning out those junk boxes...who knows what other potential decorations might lurk in there!!!