The projects I created for Value Village/Savers are now live on their site! Grab some tea and let's chat about them!
The overall theme for their holiday season is "Shop Green, Give Green", so I knew right away I'd like to have fun playing with various shades of green. Knowing that these projects will be up on the website alongside last year's holiday projects, it was decided to keep the color story more traditional this time around. Hopefully I managed to give it a modern twist.
The kids and I visited a tree farm in early October for that sweet little tree (yep, it's real). I picked one, and the owner sawed it down and stuffed it in the car for me. He was so nice. It was all blissfully easy, until that H U G E spider crawled out of the tree and onto Ian's seat on the way home. I thought that kid was going to break the window and jump out of the car before I could pull over. But I did, and I got it, and settled Ian down.
Whew!
Then it happened again.
It was an interesting day to say the least.
Oh well, let's move on...
Its such a pretty little tree, isn't it?
I had a lot of fun with fabric stiffener and a large doily tablecloth I found at. V.V. Parts of the tablecloth became ornaments for the tree-
and other parts became bowls-
My favorite of all the projects I did this time around was the sewn furniture. For the green box, I simply marked with a pencil, then drilled holes to form 1" x 1" squares, and sewed the squares with different colors of yarn. For the stool, I cleaned and stained it (this was how it looked originally). I printed our name out in Helvetica on the computer, playing with the size until I got what I was going for, then Peter drilled evenly spaced holes to form the letters. I backstitched through the holes with green yarn. Trust me...go buy some old wooden something (tray, box, anything) and do this. You will love the effect-
This was an Anthropologie idea I'd had stored away in my brain for a couple of years. Do you remember their fabric decoupaged teapots? These are glass plates decoupaged with fabric (the fabric is on top of the plate), then mod-podged over that, with white cups glued to the center of the plates-
Brooches into ornaments (there's a goldmine of these to be found at V.V., Could you imagine a tree full of these?)-
A vintagey fabric hand-patched pair of the perfect fitting jeans-
This gift idea is a bag of tags and cards made from vintage trim, buttons, etc, meant to give as a gift to someone and they will have it to use all year long for sending cards and labelling gifts.
These picture frames are completely random in style and varied in size, but unified by paint! Buy an odd number of frames, from large to small, clean and paint them, then add a stripe going through them all (sometimes through the center, sometimes above or below). Hang them in a line, lining up the line you painted across them. Instant collection.
There is plenty of time to make these project before the holiday season. All of the project instructions, plus some additional projects, are on the Value Village website.
I'd love to hear if you jump in and make something.
(all photographs by EJ Armstrong)
