October 18, 2009
Halloween decorations don’t have to be expensive. I collect wine bottles and cover them with labels from the craft store, use battery-operated tea lights behind books and objects, and repaint hand-me-down decorations. Every year, I buy one or two new decorations, so that I slowly build a collection of pieces I really like (like last year’s finds, my glitter crackle ghost from Pier 1 and ghost tea light holders from a shop in Smithville, NJ). A final touch is stretching spiderwebs (re-used year to year) over everything.
(more…)
Listed in Chic Halloween | Leave a comment!
October 14, 2009
In Cape May last month, I stopped into one of the boutique stores on the mall and spotted black and white floral silhouettes on stretched canvas. I loved the look, but the paintings were $25 each, and I didn’t have any of the plants in my own garden.
So I went to the crafts store and picked up a 2-pack of canvases for about $7. I used inexpensive acrylic craft paint (under $2 a bottle) to create a washed-out cream background on each canvas, which I let completely dry. On the next sunny afternoon, I traced silhouettes cast by a red salvia and a peony in my garden in pencil. Then I mixed a custom gray with hints of turquoise, which I used to fill in the silhouettes. It took a few layers to fill in the silhouettes completely, about two hours per painting. The result? Inexpensive art featuring real plants in my own garden – definitely not something I’m going to find in a store!
Listed in Decorating + DIY | Leave a comment!
