Two Penny-Pinching Projects

Today I wanted to share with you two more little projects I did for J & A’s master bedroom. (The big reveal is coming up this week. I just have to get my photographer, a.k.a., my retired photographer mom with the fancy camera, over to the house to take some beautiful photos! My little point and click camera just won’t do the job.)

First up, I needed to make another pillow. You see, I had originally intended to use two chairs at the foot of the bed. Remember these? They got a makeover, and I was going to use both of them in the bedroom.

Well, when I was arranging everything in the room, things felt a little off balance because the corner with the two windows was feeling a bit empty and bare. I moved one of the chairs into the corner with the ottoman, and BINGO! That’s exactly what it needed.

Well, then I was stuck with two matching pillows that were intended for the two chairs.

So I decided to use those on the bed, which left my lone little chair without a pillow. I searched around and found one small scrap of fabric that I had left over from the new table skirts.

The piece of fabric was just large enough to make a pillow front. How fortunate! Then I wanted to add a trim to the pillow, but I absolutely did NOT want to spend more money, so I started looking around for something I could use. I some pretty random ideas, like making my own jute trim, since I had an entire spool of jute.

But then I remembered that I when I was making the table skirts, I had cut off all of the selvages from the fabric, and they just happened to have cute little fringy edges.

So I gathered up all of the strips of selvage I could find, gathered them, and used them as a fringy ruffly trim for the pillow.

Isn’t that cute?

Now this next project I’m sure you’ve seen, but I’ve been wanting to make one of these book wreaths for a long time now. The supplies cost under $10. (And by the way, I’d LOVE to know how people make these for $2, like some claim they do. The glue sticks alone cost me about $5!! And the wreath form was $3.)

Anyway, I still think $8 is a very reasonable price to pay for something so great.

I ended up making mine much fuller than the ones I saw online (more is generally better in my mind), and I also crinkled the edges a bit. I love the way it turned out! And the bonus with this project…if you use a book by an author that you don’t really like, the process can be quite fun. I won’t mention the name of the author whose work I destroyed, but let me just say that every rip of every page brought a little smile to my face. If you don’t have a book on your shelf you can use, you can always pick of a book at the dollar store or Goodwill.

I’m working on complete tutorials for these projects, as well as the other diy projects in J & A’s bedroom, and hope to have most (maybe all) of them ready to post at the same time I post the full before and after pictures of the room.

Have a great day!