Recycled snowmen

Went to the thrifty shops after the dentist yesterday and had so much fun.  I would just stand and stare at things. Finally settled on bringing home a bunch of snowmen.  My brother and his family came today and brought pizza for lunch.  He and his son fixed my KeroSun space heater so I could warm up the garage.  I needed a large place to play today.  :o)

Everything at the thrifty store was half off so this little gem was $2.99.  I unassembled it and tossed the words.  Gave me 7 snowmen to play with!

The hat on this little Santa got saved - the rest got boxed up for another idea later on.  :o)

The little hat went on this guy.  A snowman in a tuxedo?  Just too cute for words!!!  He has "tails" in the back of the jacket!

I think this was a quarter….

This one was 47 cents….

another quarter for this….when they are so cheap, I just have to bring them home!!!

The sleigh is pretty well chewed up.  wood showing through the paint.  I thought about stripping it, but decided I'd just be lazy!  Only $4 for this.



After taking everything apart, I used my low temp glue gun to reassemble all the little snowmen on top of the sleigh.

And then I put it outside on my patio table.  I counted up and I have a total of $8.00 in this entire thing and it is just too cute!  Someone else's trash is definitely my treasures!  Hope it puts a smile on your face!

But oops!  I realized you could see the sleigh where the paint had worn off.  NOT good!  I had parts of an old wreath that I took apart even more and then glued it around the base.  Well, I do think it's complete now!  Will wait and put it back outside on the table in the morning.  Going to enjoy it inside tonight!  :o)

I just get the biggest kick out of recycling stuff!  I hope you all will continue to take what you don't want to the thrifty store so I can continue to have this much fun!!!

Let it Snow!!!

It's been snowing here for a couple of days, but most of it is melting as fast as it comes down.  Roads are dry, so my sis and I went thrift store shopping today.  I was in a snowy mood for sure!  Found this cute photo frame:

and this metal photo frame:

and this metal sleigh:

and this candle ring

came home and started taking the frames and the candle ring apart and reassembling them on the sleigh on top of the snowmen that were there.  You can see the metal showman from the frame on the lower right and the plastic snowmen to the left of him:

the other metal tree to the left.  I painted the entire sleigh with Cool Pool Blue Ranger dabber.  OK, that dabber is 6 years old and the paint inside is still good! I think that's pretty amazing.

I put the greenery around the bottom, added a ribbon, stickled the background, the greenery with crystal stickles.

It's got great depth.  I love all the shadows as well as the detail….

So much better than the original sleigh.  And the colors are updated.  I'm going to let it dry overnight and then hang it outside by my front door in the morning.

Recycled art - something that I love doing.  All 4 items totaled $8.00.  Love the thrift stores around here!!!

All those empty cricut boxes

Now that Michaels sells this nifty little organizer to put your books and cartridges in - what did you do with all those empty boxes?

I set off to decorate a few of mine!  I loved the old dioramas that we made in grade school and these boxes are the perfect size for them!

Here's the front of the box.  diecuts, flowers, pearls, bling.  Love this paper!

a diecut dressform and then Jolee's stickers - really!  And prima velvet flowers. 

So my cricut box is now a perfect closet!

But then I found some old battery operated lights and decided I needed to do something to use them.  This was a bit more difficult as I literally built a faux back to the box to hide the battery and wires so I still had the full depth of the box to play with.  This one has to stay open, the first one can be closed.

The lights are on the top left side of the open box.

The deer are die cuts.  The 3D snowmen are ornaments from the thrift store.  Tim Holtz trees.  The snowflake border diecut across the top, ok lots of die cuts.  You'll have to look at these closeups...and I made the tissue paper tensile  on the bottom.

The deer are cut in glitter paper, and there's loads of crystal stickles glitter that just doesn't show up.  vintage blue rayon ribbons.  Even a tiny little bird in the tree.  It's so much fun to have to hunt to find all the little things buried in this former cricut box!

I do think I love doing dimensional paper art like this and diecuts just make it so much fun!  Most of these are from Memory Box.  Even the paper in the background is gorgeous.

So once again, what did you do with your empty cricut boxes???