Create on a budget (aka the "I hate money" post)

Ok, so I don't actually hate money. I am frugal enough that we can live on one income and I shouldn't complain about that. Life is great and we are blessed. But I do whine {on occassion} about my lack of extra money for all of those yummy crafting supplies that call my name when I wander the aisles at several stores in town (oh who am I kidding...in town, out of town, online...). I mean come on...if you won the lottery {besides paying off your house} where is the first place you'd go for a huge splurge? Scrapbooking. Supplies. I actually get a little shiver even dreaming about it. So a lot of the time I have to settle for trying to repurpose what I already have. I am no crafting genius {I leave that to my friends!} but I was so super impressed with myself for this little gem I had to blog it. My oldest son wanted to decorate his room with popcorn strings which was great...I had several cups of stale popcorn kernels just waiting to be strung. But I thought...how can I make this cooler? And that started a journey that ended in a mess. And that's just how I like it! Start with air popping your kernels. Do not add butter (even if this does go against every fiber of your being) Try to stop the little fingers from eating it...go ahead, I dare ya. You just might lose an arm.

Use quilting thread so it won't break. Be careful not to poke yourself.

String popcorn until your back hurts and your fingers are numb. Then continue for just a few minutes more. Until it looks like this. Oooorrrr maybe until you get sick and tired of stabbing yourself and you cut the thread, deciding that that is long enough. Um yeah, it just may have happened like that at my house.

Ok, for this next part I have no photos because it was super SUPER {deliciously} messy and I didn't want to bring my camera anywhere near that. So you'll have to settle for a rather loose description. The background info being I thought it would look much cooler if the popcorn was coloured. So I went through my card catalogue brain on all the possible ways to colour it without making it melt. Because popcorn does that. Wet+popcorn=goopy mess. I finally settled on Glimmer Mist! GENIUS! So I laid out a towel on my work surface, put plastic bags on top of that and sprayed to my little hearts content. It was grand. At the end though...there was a huge puddle of glimmer mist floating on the bags. And I absolutely could not waste it. {Refer to the opening of this post} so I took care of another thing on my holiday to do list by dipping a whole bunch of tagsinto the puddles. (the ones you can pick up at Staples for less than $5 for a box of 100) They came out beautifully and now I have some holly jolly red tags to attach to every single gift we are giving this year. I'm going to stamp the recipient's name on it in black ink and handwrite on the back who is from. Oh, and the popcorn strings turned out great too, don't you think? It looks like cinnamon popcorn. Oh shoot...making that is on my holiday list too. Must get on that!

You can make it as light or as dark as you want just make sure you spray it and don't dip it. I found that I had to keep moving the string on the table so it didn't soak in the puddle or it became so saturated it just looked black. If you were really energetic, you could pre-spray the popcorn in old bowls, lay it out to dry and then string it with alternating colours. Maybe next year. xox