A Dollar at Goodwill…
Whenever I do a TV segment or magazine shoot, I have to buy multiples of products and supplies to show the various steps it takes to get from Point A to Point B in a project. So, if I’m showing a project on recycling CDs into a dumbbell, I need to buy 1000 CDs to have everything from raw supplies, interim semi-completed projects and finished examples to show. That’s why I love Goodwill for things like this: they have ample supplies of donated goods, it’s cheap and all the money used to buy these items diverts it from landfills and supports a worthwhile nonprofit.
So, one day, the manager at my local store asked me what on Earth I do with the shopping carts full of items (e.g. cassette tapes, sweaters, Christmas ornaments in July). I explained what I did for a living and he gave me a discount card; if Iever bought anything in bulk again like this, they wanted to make sure I got a break on price. Yeah for that!
So, today I saw piles of dusty silk flowers for sale and was given the chance to buy this pile for a buck. Why not?
Who doesn’t have ugly silk flowers in the attic or basement? And who hasn’t seen them for sale at the thrift store. I’m not a fan of them, personally, but I saw this as a challenge to “upcycle” something ugly into something practical..but what?
First, I started by sorting the flowers by color and removed the green leaves. They looked the fakest to me… so maybe we can group the flowers by color?
Group them by color and tie them all together using inexpensive florist tape. Wrap it around and around and snip off the stems as you go along.
And there ya have it: a gift topper. Just wrap a gift simply in recycled brown kraft paper, tie with some bakery string and knot the silk flowers on top. Okay, is this the MOST innovative thing I’ve come up with here on the blog? Hell no. But it’s definitely something I’m sure anyone would love to receive as part of a gift. One dollar for about 6 gift toppers: not bad.
When you want to clean them, just dump them in a brown paper back with a bunch of salt and shake the hell out of them. Then just shake each flower free of the salt. Works like a charm.
Great idea Danny! Another good idea would be to hot glue individual flower heads to a plain gift bag. This spruces an ordinary gift bag quite a bit and are less expensive than bags with designs or other decorations on it already.
I was in a few weddings and ended up with bouquets of fake flowers. I took one apart and hot glued it to a grapevine wreath and hung it on my front door. Yes, I would have preferred real or dried flowers but the free fakes fulfilled a need for awhile. When the flowers faded, I took them off the wreath and spray painted them with reclaimed gold and silver spray paint and used them as gift toppers.
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[...] Daily Danny: Whenever I do a TV segment or magazine shoot, I have to buy multiples of products and supplies to show the various steps it takes to get from Point A to Point B in a project… That’s why I love Goodwill for things like this: they have ample supplies of donated goods, it’s cheap and all the money used to buy these items diverts it from landfills and supports a worthwhile nonprofit. [...]
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smart. I was googling for this last summer when I collected the 15 or so bouqets of old flowers my mother-in-law had displayed around the house. For now, they’re sitting in the basement. I might try something. Thanks.
I took a bunch of flowers from my mom’s basement (as she’s a big fan of fakes) and am turning them into hairpieces. I have some netting and veiling left over from making my birdcage wedding veil and am adding it to the flowers and then putting them on hair combs and barettes to make vintage-style hair decorations.