Good Will + $5 = A Day of Fun

Earlier in the week while I was out running errands I decided to stop by Good Will to see if I could find a bit of inspiration for Saturday's Artist's Date.  I set a $5 limit, as I usually do when searching for craft projects, and happily began searching.  Here is what I found:

An old frame, a bunch of flowers, a small wooden plaque, and a tray covered in candle wax.  Score! A whole bunch of projects for $5!

I started with the wooden plaque, knowing that I was just going to paint a bit and then use it as a frame by attaching a picture with Mod Podge.

Before

After

It works. Now I just need to drill a hole in the back so that I can actually hang it on the wall and we'll be good to go with this project.

The flowers I just stuck in a vase.  No picture. They are just sitting on a table in my dining room, reminding me that spring is around the corner and I'll be able to have real flowers soon.

I wanted to make a tray out of an old picture frame.  This was not an original idea. My sister has a friend who did this and it looked very nice.  Then I saw someone else in BlogLand do the same thing (I just can't remember where right now), so I've been thinking about this project for a couple weeks.  I dug around in my fabric box to find some material and discovered an old table runner I bought one year at the Dollar Store.  It started disintegrating, of course, and was no good as a table runner but the material could still be used for something, I figured, and I hung on to it.

I went to the garage and grabbed some spray paint, thinking that a dark blue would look nice against the white fabric.  It was about the time that the spray paint started exploding all over my hands that I began to calculate how long I'd had that particular can and realized that since I bought it to make art for a child's room and that child is now 6, I've had that can for over six years.  This is what old spray paint does:

My hands after a solid five minutes of scrubbing

There's no way the paint's coming off the soap dispenser.

I also managed to paint some of the grass in my front yard blue because I didn't have enough newspaper to protect against exploding cans of paint.

Moral of the story: don't use old spray paint.

While I waited for the paint to dry, I cut the fabric for the inside of the tray.

Because I am lazy, I actually just used a few pieces of double-sided tape to hold the fabric in place, knowing that the glass and the wooden frame itself would help keep the whole project together.  And it worked!

The last (completed) project for the day was to take the old, waxy tray and turn it into something usable.  By this point in the day I forgot to take pictures as I went along, so you'll have to imagine.  I scrubbed the tray a bit to see if I could get some of the wax off.  When it was relatively smooth I took it outside and gave it a few coats of (newer) spray paint.  Once the spray paint dried I brought the tray inside and cut a piece of scrapbook paper to fit the bottom and then used Mod Podge to attach and seal it.  I think it turned out rather well!

I started on a few other crafty projects yesterday, but none of them are anywhere close to being done.  This week is pretty busy, so they'll all probably have to wait until next Saturday.

Yesterday as I was crafting I kept thinking about my grandmother and great-grandmother.  They did so love to craft.  I wish that they were still here so that we could craft together.

I linked up here: