Recently I was cleaning out my shopping bag section in the kitchen and while I only keep the really nice thick-papered shopping bags I get, it was time to purge. But purging is really hard when you really like the bag. Take this Lime Crime bag I actually tweeted about here a few months back. I love it but what do I do with it? It’s paper so it’s not really practical for grocery shopping but I didn’t want to get rid of it either. So I stuff it back where it was with some others I couldn’t seem to purge, between the wall and stove.

Enter Pinterest… 

 

Ms. Darla loves the new Christmas Tree Cone!

 

I just love perusing their DIY/Craft category to see what people are creating for the holidays and one that had me intrigued was this one and this one about creating Christmas Tree Cones. One crafter uses poster board to create the trees and another I saw other uses the foam shapes you can pick up at any craft store usually in the flower section. For some reason, I didn’t want to pay $6.99 or $8.99 for a foam form and thick paper, well I already had some at home. I just knew I could do it without buying the Styrofoam form. And then I had a lightbulb moment in the middle of Michael’s last night. I could use some of the really nice paper shopping bags I had! I mean, I have some sketch pad paper but I think some of the bags I have are actually made of better paper! Whoo-hoo, so I bought a box of the loose pearls to adorn one for $4.19 (normally $6.99 but I had a 40% off coupon, which they always have on the Retail Me Not app) and cruised home.

Since the pearls I was bought were a mix of white, ivory and grey, I decided to use the Stop Staring! bag I had from that day. I went to their annual sample sale (picked up a skirt suit and amazing dress coat, btw) and after I cut the bottom off, it seems like the right size for to make two cones. Not having a template, I played around with the paper and then actually made my own template out of a brown paper bag.

So I created two of them shown here and then the smaller one is just made from sketch paper. I taped the sides closed and then made sure the bottom that touches the table was level.

They I heated up my glue gun and went to town gluing the pearls onto the tallest cone. I added some accents like crystals that I had here already.

The medium cone is going to be covered with gold beads that I picked up from Joann’s fabric for $2.79 on sale/18 foot strands. I bought two strands.

And I bought some red beads on a string like the gold ones above that I'm going to do the third cone in. I also bought some red lace trim so the cone will not be solid beads. It should look pretty cool!

And no, I haven't figured out what to do with that Lime Crime bag yet. Any ideas?