LESSology Challenge #3 Guest Designer: Karen Baker! :)

Our guest designer for LESSology Challenge #3: The Doggy Bag is the talented Karen Baker! :)

I am really excited to be a guest designer at LESSology! What a great site for inspiration and great tips on upcycling items to create beautiful projects.

My time is pretty limited with two boys in school so I appreciate those fall decorations that can last through the holidays in fall up until the first of December. I asked my two boys to save their brown paper lunch sacks for a couple of days so I could use them for this project. It took a couple of days for them to remember, but after a while I ended up with some lovely textured kraft medium. I knew I also wanted to incorporate natural items found this time of year, as nothing forces you to upcycling than the change of seasons! Both the lunch sacks and nature items, along with just a few other supplies, helped me create some decorative, abstract fall flowers.  Since I decided on a monochromatic landscape for my vase to set and for the flowers, I wanted to incorporate a lot of different textures into each ball.

To create the dried hydrangea flower, I die cut numerous scalloped circles from the upcycled paper lunch sacks, scrunched them into a bud shape and glued them onto a styrofoam ball. The stem is simply a skewer stick from the kitchen section at my local discount store!

The smallest flower is simply punched circles in varying sizes from the left over from the paper lunch sacks. These were then glued in an overlapping fashion to a styrofoam ball with my boys' school glue. The stem again, is a skewer stick.

The final flower consists of a number of acorn tops hot glued to another styrofoam ball, complete with a skewer stick stem.

I tucked the three flowers in a vase, secured them with whole acorns and embellished the overall look with dried wheat grass to give the piece some height. The backdrop is a recycled cranberry crate-I love the worn, washed out look of the wood and found the blue hues complimented the orange hues of my flowers nicely.

I had so much fun creating this project! I enrolled the help of my sons to pick the acorns and toppers, my sister and I brainstormed to come up with the hydrangea and I have a decorated spot in my living room that both my mother and aunt would be proud of! Thank you to the LESSology crew for inviting me to be part of their challenge, and I hope to see your "brown paper bag" ideas soon!

What an awesome display from Karen! Hope she has inspired you with yet another fabulous idea for LESSology Challenge #3: The Doggy Bag. Please leave a comment for our guest Karen.