SHELF UPCYCLE WITH MAPS

I love this upcycle so much! I snagged these shelves at a dumpster outside of the dorms at my university. People are unbelievable when it comes to throwing things out! Many of them live out of state and have to fly or drive home so they have no choice but to throw out lots of stuff. My sister once found a down comforter and an Ipod dock in the dumpster at her school!

So anyways I grabbed these and wanted to wait to figure out what to do with them. Since school has ended I've also been trying to clean out my closet and came across a bunch of old maps! So I came up with this idea for these shelves and it fits my bathroom perfectly! Check out another DIY project that amy did with maps!

Here is the before and an after!

 

 

 SUPPLIES:

 Mod Podge, Maps, Exacto-Knife

DIRECTIONS:

1. Peel off any paper existing on the shelves, where you are going to lay the maps. If you want to paint the shelves any other color, do that now as well.

2. Figure out what area of the map you want to use. Cut the map into a smaller section so it is easier to manage, but not as small as your shelf size.

3. Put your map into the shelf and press into the corners to make creases. Run your exacto knife along the edges.

4. Put a very thin layer of Mod Podge on the shelf, then put your map section on. Use a heavy object to try to get any bubbles out. Let dry.

5. Put another layer of Mod Podge over the top of the map to seal it up!

-Jerica-

VINTAGE COOKBOOK UPCYCLE

Well this project was quite tough to name...it's a cookbook upcycle to well... a cookbook! Jerica and I both love to try new recipes and cook for our friends. Inspired by a post from one of our favorite blogs A Beautiful Mess, we both started our own cookbooks. This is a fun alternative to store and archive all of our favorite recipes so it is quick and accessible in the kitchen as we cook (instead of having our laptops in the kitchen- can't tell you how many times I have almost spilled on my laptop)! This if a fun, easy and progressive project you can always be working on. It also gives a lot of room for creativity. As you can see there is no one way to do it and each and every book will be unique and one of a kind.

All you need to do is find a old cookbook that you do not really care for (Jerica and I both picked ours up at the thrift store) and paste in your recipes however you like! Jerica (bottom of image) used different types of scrap paper and magazine pictures for a border around recipes that she edited with cool fonts and printed out on the computer. She also added category tags to section off her recipes in her cook book!

For mine ( image top) I hand wrote my recipes and titles on lined paper and pasted them in. You can really do whatever you want with it! I followed the original book's sections and categories and pasted each of my recipes under the right section.  We both left parts of the original pages visible to preserve the look and feel of the original cookbook. Another cool idea is to add in your own pictures the recipes as well! My book was a little too small for that but maybe for another book! 

-Amy-

TRIANGLE ART WITH PAINT SAMPLES

Another craft with a thrift store frame and paint samples! I used the card stock that was already in the back of the frame, painted it white, and used a little mod podge to glue all the triangles on. The triangles are cut from paint samples, as well as Anthropology and Urban Outfitters catalogs. Seeing as everything is too expensive for me might as well put those catalogs to good use!

-Jerica-