About a month before little Rilyn was bornThe first thing I thought of was something large and fabric…a blanket! I asked her if she had a blanket or quilt that could be hung on the wall. After some brainstorming we both remembered that she had her own baby quilt that her Aunt Jackie had cross-stitched 25 years ago when she was born. We dug out the blanket and laid it out on the floor. Perfect!
Then Anne thought of some collage picture frames that she hadAnne filled in a few pictures she had of her pregnant belly and the rest of the 3×5 openings she filled with scrapbooking paper. We hung it all on the wall and were amazed at how it warmed up the room.
On one other wall, we used four different pieces of scrapbooking paper and arranged them in a simple line with an alternating pattern. That was it! Not a dime was spent and Rilyn has a beautiful room!
(If you’d like more ideas, I have an article over on the Guidepost blog today called “Decorating on a Shoe String Budget.” You can find it here.)
What about you? What creative ideas do you have for decorating with less?
I've been working on Suhn's room (our daughter we are bringing home from China in a month!!).
I wanted to purchase the letters of her name for her room, but not wanting to spend a lot of money.
So I decided to get a little creative with decoupage. I bought 4 8 X 10 canvases from Hobby Lobby. They were 50% off and cost less then $10 total. I purchased a few sheets of scrapbook paper and the result you can see here: http://whadusay2.blogspot.com/2010/04/attempts-at-craftiness-with-decoupage.html
I was very pleased with how they turned out and even more pleased with the final cost! It took a little time to cut out the letters, but the process was VERY easy – anyone could do it!
My son loves to paint. We live near a business park and they throw out SO much blank paper to recycle. I just pick some of it up, give Alex paint and he goes crazy. His 12 ft walls were very bare but are now covered in his beautiful artwork. We use all different size paper so I place them in an asymmetrical arrangement on the wall. 🙂
We just recently redid our kitchen. I wanted to completely remodel it because the cabinets, countertops and walls were last updated in 1964. However, the $10,000 price tag was way out of our reach right now. So, I decided to keep everything just give it a facelift. I painted the old wood paneling a deep "barn" red. I repainted the cabinets a nice gray color and put new hardware on. My husband said that maybe we should replace the hinges too, but they were expensive, so a coat of black spray paint made them look new. We resurfaced our countertops using a paint-like product at Lowes "Countertop Transformations". We didn't know what to do with the backsplash because it was red laminate. We bought vinyl floor tiles (at Aldi!!!) and put them up as the backsplash! We've even fooled a few people – they thought it was tile! We put up a few small sections of wallpaper and we were finished. We kept all of our appliances except the old hood above the stove – we purchased a new one online at Lowes – because it was a fraction of the price of the ones they offered in the store. The kitchen looks completely brand new! And, the best part is that we did all of this for under $900!!!
My sister is an artist and she decorated her first post-graduate apartment living room with decorative gift bags. She found some inexpensive but beautiful gift bags of all different sizes and hung them in a collection on the main wall. It was low budget, attractive, and a great conversation piece.
When I decorated my daughter's room, I had a stamp set of butterflies, some with their wings open and closed. I stamped them onto her wall in a sort of wind pattern in different pastel colors. Easiest of all was that the ink I used was washable so when we moved, a little windex and they were gone!
I love the idea of simply hanging scrapbook paper on the wall! I found silhouettes of transportation vehicles online and printed them in a large size. I then traced them onto scrapbook paper, cut them out and framed them with simple black frames. I hung them in a line in my son's room.
great ideas! I love finding ways to use scrapbooking stuff in decorating! Also a great resource is craigslist. If you have a little bit of $ you can make it go a long way if you are patient enough to wait for the right deal to come along!