Trash-to-treasure expert Robb Whittlef presents ingenious ways to add holiday cheer to your home with castoff treasures and flea-market finds. Make a cheery table screen with window shutters, a serving tray from an old picture frame or a mosaic-patterned pot with broken china. Make a Christmas table screen with four old window shutters hinged together. Glue on thin green-painted plywood trees between sections of diagonal candy-cane striping. Frame favorite holiday photos or cards, add handles to the frame, and you've got a nifty holiday serving tray (figure A). Rob lightened an old picture frame with a whitewash mixture made from two parts water and one part paint and used it to frame antique postcards with decorative art paper and mat board. Brighten a mantel or a desktop with a charming pair of ice-skate bookends (figure B). Rob used epoxy to attach an old pair of tiny black ice-skates to red bookends made from old fence pickets, then embellished each skate with a red bow. Give that poinsettia something pretty to sit in. Carefully break a chipped piece of holiday-design china in a plastic bag, then re-create the original design mosaic-style on the outside of a terra-cotta pot (figure C). Attach the broken china to the pot with tile adhesive, and fill the cracks with grout. Too many ornaments and not enough tree? Use pretty lengths of ribbon to hang favorite ornaments from an old wooden ladder wrapped with French wired ribbon (figure D ).
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