Show & Tell Sunday/I Saw Red

Today's theme at Show & Tell Sunday is Trash to Treasure. This is a favorite topic of mine and there are so many sources where you can find ideas on this subject. There are a ton of books available with lots of ideas. In fact my favorite JunkMarket gals, Ki and Sue, have written two books about turning trash into treasure. HGTV's Decorating Cents always ends the show with a Trash to Treasure segment. And the Junk Brothers (also on HGTV) have an entire show dedicated to making beautiful things from other people's discards. In this age of Reduce-Reuse-Recycle, it's great to see people breathe new life into things that would otherwise end up in the landfills.

The first item in my Trash to Treasure photo album is this secretary desk that sits in the front hall of my house. I wish I had a "before" picture to show you because it really was very ugly. The secretary was given to me by my best friend. She was moving and didn't have room for it in her new home, so she asked if I would like it. Since I always dreamed of having a desk like this, I jumped at the chance. When I got it, it was painted a putrid avocado green, with black antiquing glaze over it. Ugh! The doors were fitted with textured plexi-glass panels in a lovely shade of harvest gold. Well, none of that was going to work in this shabby chic girl's house, so I painted the entire piece blue, added some decorative painting to the front of it, replaced the knobs and had the doors refitted with plain glass. What a difference a little bit of TLC makes!

I found this old scrap piece of decorative wood, pictured below, at my husband's shop one day and brought it home knowing I could do something with it. I added 3 pink glass knobs I purchase from Anthropologie and it now hangs in my studio displaying a couple of my favorite swap pretties.

Some of you may have remembered seeing in previous posts the glass jars I use for storage in my studio. Well, this is what they started out looking like:

They held votive candles at the shop I used to manage. When the store closed, I took these jars home with me knowing I could use them for something. (I think this is the reason my garage is over-lowing with cast-offs that I "just know" I can transform someday!) I painted the lids shabby white and added some more of those pink Anthropologie knobs and voila!....a place to store trims and lace and millinery flowers.

I found this next idea in one of those special publication magazines put out by Better Homes & Gardens. To make the table/plant stand, I used 4 old dark brown stained shutters that we had taken off the windows in the spare bedroom. I painted them with one coat of white paint and then sanded down the edges to make them look shabby. Next I nailed the four shutters together to form the tables base. I topped it off with a 12x12 porcelain floor tile we had left over from an earlier home improvement project.It was the perfect fit for this corner of my diningroom.

Old windows seem to be all the rage these days. We found this old vintage window on the curb on garbage day. In fact there was a whole slew of them there because the homeowners just had their windows replaced. We asked if they minded us taking some and they said, "take them all if you want"...so we did! I found a vendor at a craft show who makes window clings and they had a line that turned a plain window into a stained glass looking window. The company is called Window Cling Designs and they have lots and lots of designs. If you're interested, you can find them here. I just have this one hanging, chippy paint and all, on the wall in my diningroom. And I love it! My final Trash to Treasure photo is this memo board in my kitchen. I wanted a to have a chalk board to write on and a magnetic board for notes and pretty postcards, etc. However, my kitchen is itty-bitty and wall space is at a premium, so I decided that I had to combine the two somehow. I found this old frame that wasn't being used and had the hardware store cut a piece of metal to fit inside. I painted the metal with 2-3 coats of chalkboard paint and added the decorative iron fence to the top of it. Now I can write on it and attach notes using magnets and it all fits on this skinny little wall.If you want to see other Trash to Treasure creations visit Analise's blog, Sugar-Sugar here for a list of participants and/or the Show & Tell Sunday Flickr site here.

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~ I Saw Red Challenge ~

These plants are sitting next to my driveway waiting for someone to plant them. And it is HOT here so then need to get planted soon! Who decided it was a good idea to buy and plant flowers during the hottest weekend so far this summer? These photos aren't the greatest because the geraniums below look orange. They are not. They are really red and so they qualify for this last day of the I Saw Red Challenge.
And then finally ~ I know this one's been done before by many of the I Saw Red participants, but I couldn't resist a plate of bing cherries sitting on a swatch of vintage dotted swiss fabric. Actually this was the first photo I took for the challenge, but it's the last one to be posted. I know what you are thinking and I have only one response ~ doesn't everyone serve their cherries with a little red gingham bow attached to them?
Thanks so much to Sara over at Sadie Olive. She dreamed up the I Saw Red Challenge and it's been so much fun searching for red things to photograph and even more fun to see what everyone else photographed. You can see them all for yourself by clicking here.