Upcycled Garland

Hi.  My name is Tammi and I'm a paint-sample-holic.  Yes, it's true.  I cruise the aisles of hardwares stores and grab fistfuls of paper paint samples while no one is looking.  It's hard to resist the rainbow of colors and let us not forget the lovely card stock they are printed on.

I like to use my handy-dandy Smith-Corona to type up thank you notes on the larger samples, as well as quick notes on the smaller strips and use them as hang tags on gifts.  Some of the paint colors have the cutest names:  margarita green, bull's eye red, baby pink and pumpkin seed orange.  I just love me a paint sample.  But they were piling up in my desk drawer and I wasn't using them quite fast enough.  How was I going to keep my habit fresh and alive, if I couldn't use them in all of their color glory?  Yes, part of the addiction is looking at them and seeing their array of color goodness staring up at me every time I opened the drawer of paper love, but something had to be done to lighten this color swatch load.

So I decided to cut out hundreds of ovals with scalloped edges to use for a garland project, as well as using them as hang tags on our xmas gifts this year.  The scalloped punching mechanism that I found on sale at a craft store was like magic and transformed my once humble paint samples into things of beauty.  I even gathered posters, postcards and heavy magazine covers and punched away.

The irony of all of this is the color covering about 80% of the walls in my home is Ralph Lauren's Sand.  Yes, like the sand on the beach.  My mother calls it boring beige.  While I don't want my walls screaming at me, I do love color sprinkled throughout and let's not forget my love of all things shiny.  I don't think Mr. Lauren would endorse the renaming of his paint to boring beige, as he has some pretty cool names to sell that color spectrum to you like Sisal, Muslin, Raffia & Parchment.

I opted to string these punched lovelies onto silver metallic wire edge ribbon that I picked up for 50 cents at the Legacy Thrift Store in Sebastopol for 20 yards!  Since I was putting two pieces of card stock on the garland back-to-back (you don't want the white/gray texted side showing on the back of the paint sample - or maybe you do?), the wire edge on the ribbon gave them structure when they were hung.

Marrying my love of silver, color, paint samples and hole-punching was a really great way to upcycle all of them into a useful project and was a really nice way to come clean on my addiction to all of you!

My name is Tammi and it's been five days since my last visit to the paint store.