A New Look

Every year my parents give us one of those big tins of popcorn. And every year the kids devour it and I throw the tin away. Well, this year I decided to try to make something useful from it.

It started like this:

I roughed it up with some steel wool. (Not the mafia kind of roughed up, just a little scratching the finish. HA!)

Then I coated it with a thin layer of mod podge and applied a couple of sheets of scrap booking paper. Of course it needed two sheets plus about 1-1/2 inch of a third sheet of paper. One of my daughters was quick to point out that I didn't match the seams.

I sent her to her room.

Not really, but I did tell her not to inspect my work so closely.


Here's the finished product. Well, maybe finished. I have paper to do the lid but haven't done it yet. I can't decide if I should or not. I mean, the red actually matches.

So, I did this with no idea of what I was going to use it for. But this morning I think I actually decided to use it to hold the wild bird food. Right now it's just in the bag sitting on my pantry floor and won't this look so much better than that?

If I keep making things that are cute to hold the stuff in my pantry I'm going to have to take the door off and force people to go look at it when they come to my house.

Saved from the trash part 2

I don't have a lot of these laying around because we don't drink wine. But I do use it for cooking so every now and then I have a bottle to use for something.

I've seen pictures around of the bottles wrapped with twine to use as a vase and I decided to give it a try with this one.

I only had very thin twine. I don't recommend it! LOL

Anyway, because of the very thin twin, I decided to just cover the part of the bottle where the label is. I just dotted hot glue here and there to hold it in place rather than trying to do the whole thing.

I think it turned out cute and a little rustic looking (and rustic totally goes with most of my house.) Now I can't wait to buy myself some flowers and use it.

Saved from the trash

During the school year I make lunches for my kids everyday. I don't think they've bought their lunch even once since they started at the Jr. High two years ago.

As you can imagine, we go through quite a few of these.

I hate throwing away these big plastic containers so I try to find something else to do with them.

I'm starting to run out of things to put in them quite frankly. So, I've been wanting to try growing some sweet potatoes and the other day it finally hit me that I could cut the top off of these and use them. They're plenty deep enough.

See...

The reason I've been trying to figure something out is because I needed it to be a container that was in the house. Even though we live on 5 acres and the back yard is fenced separately from the rest of the acreage, we have a doberman that climbs over that fence and uses anything he can find int he front to play with. If I tried to plant anything out there, he would have it torn up in a matter of minutes. Leaving wet or muddy shoes on the porch to dry isn't an option either. Those are some of his favorite things to play with.

Hopefully I can keep the cats inside the house from eating the plants.

It's all just a juggling act isn't it?