Upcycled Treasures To Decorate Your Home

Suzzycue rides a bike back and forth to her day job. While other people hate Wednesday or Hump day of the week, Suzzycue calls it treasure day. Wednesday is trash day in her neighborhood. Her co-workers tease her with the name Dumpster Diva but Suzzycue laughs and continues decorating with her treasures. The following projects are some of her scores she would like to share with you.

Supplies Suzzycue used to build this blue and white glass covered vase.

• 1 large broken pink colored vase with broken lid(a curb side favorite)
• blue paint,paint brush
• a box of blue and white tea cup saucers
• Tile grout and Mortar(Mortar is a cement-based binder for joining your glass pieces and plate pieces to your vase.)and a sponge.
• white glue
• an empty blue glass bottle of water.
• creative imagination

First , glue the vase and lid back together. The one Suzzycue has is 22 inches tall so it makes a great focal point when you enter her cozy blue living room.

• Paint the lid blue to match the rest of the vase.
• Break the dishes and the water bottle ( a great stress buster)
• Take the mortar and spread it on the vase in small patches
• Fill the mortar patch with a variety of broken glass pieces and broken plates (placing the pieces together like a jig-saw puzzle) and try to use as much of the blue design showing on the broken pieces as possible.
• Spread another patch of mortar and continue this way until the vase is covered.
• Let the vase stand to dry overnight so the pieces won't move when you apply the grout.
• Grouting is messy so don't forget to use a drop sheet to protect your work surface.
• Spread the grout over the entire vase being careful to fill all the cracks and groves. Then wipe the excess off with a damp sponge. That's it, done and the blue glass circle on the front of Suzzycue's broken plate vase, is the bottom of the blue glass bottle of water.

Suzzycue often finds picture frames with prints of crazy things in them that people get tired of and throw away. The best use of these pictures is to trash the prints unless you like them and paint on the glass.

• First clean the glass and take a black magic marker and outline your drawing that you want. Here Suzzycue did a simple drawing of a Pelican.
• Fill in around the drawing with black paint for the background of the picture.
• Add the other colors with magic markers so they are transparent. Suzzycue left parts of the Pelican and the tree trunk with no color at all.
• Take the cardboard backing and cover it completely with white glue and smooth out a piece of aluminum foil to completely cover it. It does not matter if it is perfectly smooth or not.
• Reassemble the glass and cardboard,foil backing side facing the glass painting and frame it.
• The parts of the painting that are not painted will show the foil underneath, making an awesome piece of work. Well done enjoy!

Today wainscoting or buying any kind of wood is expensive so you can imagine Suzzycue`s excitement when she stumbled upon ten pairs of wooden shutters. These would become wainscoting for her hallway. Suzzycue is thinking of fastening them to the wall with a tube of liquid nails but if any of you handy persons have a better way to do this, please feel free to let her know. The walls are concrete and it is extremely hard to fasten something to without making a mess.

This weeks find was tossed out patio potted plants. This time of year a lot of people toss out their balcony plants without the pots. What they don't realize is a lot of these bouquets have tropical plants in them that are expensive to buy and Suzzycue is grateful to get them.

Another trash find that we all have in abundance in our homes is aluminum food cans. Start rinsing them out and also save the lids. They can be used to make awesome picture frames to frame mirrors for your hallway or your favorite photos.

Here is an inexpensive way to create garden art conversation pieces. Your friends won't stop talking about how easy you created personalized art for your own garden.

Good luck treasure hunting my fellow Dumpster Divas. I love to up cycle.