No Cash Trash Bash: Beautiful Boozy Bookend

I'm a little pleased with myself right now, so please bear with me.  It cost me $0 to make this craft.  Absolutely freeeee is my favorite craft budget!  I have been stashing all the materials to make this craft for a while, until I finally had everything together.

All you need is an empty 6-pack.  Keep the whole thing: cardboard pack and the bottles.  I say keep the bottle caps too, because you know I'm going to come up with something to do with 'em in no time.  Luckily, I live with a young man in his 20's and so these are ALWAYS stacked plentifully in the recycle bin and I can have my pick.  I highly recommend that you wash these out with dish soap and let them dry for a good long while.  I called this  a "Boozy Bookend", but let's get real; I do not want my desk or bookshelf to reek of old beer.  Gross.  To be fair, if you don't have access to beer bottles because you don't drink, you could do the same thing with Coca-Cola glass bottles in a 6-pack, but I don't live in 1954, so they're not readily available to me.  I think there are flavored sodas in glass bottle 6-packs at the grocery store, but as I said before the appeal of this craft for me was that it was FREE materials.  Deal with it.

I really don't know what came over me yesterday.  One minute I was waking up at 7a.m. to get ahead on homework (confession:  I had a post due for one of my online classes at 9a.m. and may or may not have procrastinated a touch.)  The next thing I knew, I had done a day's worth of school work in less than two hours and by 9a.m. I had three crafts going an one time!  (Look for the frame and magazine pages in upcoming posts)  I may have lost my mind for just a sec, but it worked.  I found out that my white acrylic paint is alarmingly thin, so I was able to work on other crafty projects between the million or so coats it took to achieve full-coverage. 

I use dried roses in this post.  These roses from a bouquet I received after my fall were dried for 3ish days before I placed them in these bottles.  If you don't know how to dry roses so that they keep their shape and color, comment below and I'll share that.  I've been doing it since high school, so I will just go on assuming that everyone knows how to do that.

On to the actual tutorial...

Step 1:  Wash the bottles out.  Seriously, this is non-negotiable.  Let them dry completely before painting.  Step 2: Paint the bottles with acrylic.  Thinner gloss paints will require multiple coats (the white took 5 or more for full coverage) whereas thicker flat coats were full-coverage in only a coat or two.  The purple was a flat paint, so after it dried I covered with Mod Podge to give a gloss finish and protect the paint.  Step 3: Spray paint the cardboard container.  I recommend priming with primer or acrylic paint.  ESPECIALLY on the exposed raw cardboard on the inside of the container.  It just soaks spray paint right up.

Step 4: Once everything is dry, plop them together and stick 'em on a shelf.  TaDa!!!  That wasn't so hard now, was it?

Linked up at the following parties: Crafty Soiree, Blog Stalking Thursday, Hookin' up with HOH, Show off your stuff party

No-Cash Trash Bash: Bottle Shock

I was so in love with the idea that there were crafts waiting for me that I dove into my recycle bin this week, searching for inspiration.  One of my roommates loves to try different types of beer (especially from microbrews) so we always have a few bottles in the bin.  [I really want to emphasize that I dug these out of the recycle.  My roommates would murder me if I let you believe we lived with all these beer bottles on the counter.]  I pulled some out, determined to think of something to do.  I peeled off the labels, then they sat around in my room for a few days (which is not a good look) and I finally decided I had to do something.  I Initially liked the idea of wrapping them in yarn, then putting them on a floating shelf with maybe a simple decorative flower. 



[I was recently at my friend Bailey's apartment and she had these floating shelves which reminded me of how much I loved my bestie Shelby's bedroom decorations.  I also had some in my apartment in St. Louis which I looooooved, so yeah.  It had to happen.]

(This one is the ledge-jumper)

 While I was making my first attmept, I hit a speedbump in the shape of the bottle.  There are a few ledges that made gaps when the yarn "jumped the ledge".  I tried using hot glue gun to keep it in it's place and it got weird and clumpy and still jumped off the ledge.  So, typical me, I got super frustrated and gave up for a few more days.  Then it hit me: double-sided tape!  Problem. Solved.  You just put the tape around the bottle, half on the widest part, half on the small part right below it, then press as you wrap the yarn around it.  So here it is, super easy, super cute.  When I get home from house-sitting, I'll get these all set up and take cute pics for ya. 



Have you had any magical garbage rescues lately?  I'm going to be keeping my eyes out for anything good in the recycle bin!

Here's a final-ish product.  I added some super cheap-o flowers from the piddly flower aisle of walmart and cut of the stems.  I love the way they look, though.  Something super frilly just wouldn't go with the simple look of the piece.  My new shelf isn't cooperating, so I need to get new mounting hardware this week.  >:|  I'll post pics when my shelf decides not to be a butt-head.

No Cash Trash Bash: TP Wall Art

This no-cash trash bash is somthing that makes me immensely happy.  I am alway crafty and often broke.  The total cost of this craft is probably less than $2, but it cost me NOTHING because it was all stuff I had around the house: 1/2 a hot glue stick, maybe 1/4 can of spray paint and stuff saved from the landfill.

This idea was totally inspired by my boss. She is quite crafty and she came in last week with an idea for wall art she was thinking about doing for the living room. I was in love with the idea and decided to give it a whirl. (I did warn her that I was jacking her brilliance and she was good with it. A few of us at work swap ideas regularly.) Working with elementary school kids, we know the value of a good toilet paper / paper towel roll. How brilliant would it be to turn something that is literally garbage into beautiful wall art? Well, that's just what I did.

I should mention that I'm still house-sitting and some of my tools (like a ruler, for starters) are not here with me. To start, I took 3 paper towel rolls and measured lines the width of this pie looking tool thing I found in the drawer. I cut all these little sections out (and kept having to wrestle them away from the cat) then decided I had enough to get started. I was watching a movie ["Lost in Austen", available for instant viewing on Netflix. A really cute movie if you love Pride and Prejudice] during this whole part, it's definitely a mindless activity which is nice to have from time to time. I then began to assemble the piece. It was a very organic process, I just kind of stuck one where it looked like it needed to go. The more I added, the more I liked it. When I had all the cut pieces glued on, I considered cutting the toilet paper rolls I had collected for this craft, but decided I should stop while I was ahead.

After I had my piece all glued together, I took it out back to spray. In retrospect, spray painting it in this manner was not fun. Raw cardboard toilet paper rolls absorb so much spray paint that you have to do a zillion coats before you see full coverage. Also, you're trying to get in and around all the surfaces of waaaaaaay to many little circles. Next time, I'm going to paint the tubes with acrylic BEFORE I glue. This was really the most frustrating part of the project... other than the time my glue gun went rogue while I was trying to balance the piece I was about to glue on and catch the falling piece... Yeah... not fun. All in all, though, I LOVE LOVE LOVE this project. 

My final piece isn't exactly "final" yet, because I'm not home to hang it on the wall, but this is what I have right now.

Have you ever done something surprisingly beautiful with toilet paper rolls?

Linked on: More the Merrier Monday , Meet Me Monday , So Creative Party Time , Tutorial Tuesday , Crafty Lassie Tuesday ,