 Guys, we have a Dollar Tree challenge. So hashtag Dollar Tree challenge. Search that and you're gonna find a bunch of videos on it. Probably not just for this hop either because it's not a new idea. It's been done by YouTubers and crafters in the art community here on YouTube for a while now. Anyway, we're gonna do a $10 challenge. We have $10 to spend a Dollar Tree and then we need to create art or something creative with mostly those products. Now I am gonna probably bring this to you a few different ways and a few different ideas that we're gonna discuss when we get back to the art room. But for right now, let's go in Dollar Tree and see what we can find. All right guys, so if you watched my previous clip, then you know that we're doing a $10 dollar store challenge. Your budget was a max of $10. I of course spent $19 and I think, what was it, 25 cents. In my defense, not all of it was art supplies. That's what I'm gonna tell you anyway. I'm gonna go over what I bought and why I bought it. I don't do a lot of haul videos on the channel anymore because I don't wanna make you feel like you have to have certain things. But as part of this challenge, I wanna show you what my thinking is behind buying bargain stuff to create art with. We'll start with the pillows because they're the most bulky thing. So honestly, I bought them for the fabric. I do this a lot with little things from the Dollar Tree whether it's a decorative pillow or a headband. They often have them in glittery fabrics or these metallics. I don't want a quarter of a yard. I just want a little bit to do maybe some sort of little embellishment on a journal cover or something on a page or a tag or if you watch my channel or follow me on social media, you know I do a lot of art paper clips. I could see a little piece of this on a paper clip or have it cover a paper clip, which kind of gives me an idea. Okay. Anyway, so they had a bunch of these metallic pillows. I picked out this purple one and a turquoise one. I don't know what the stuffing is on the inside. It might just be loose stuffing. It might be a pillow form. If it's a pillow form, then I'm gonna take the cover off and I will save the pillow form and we'll see what happens. They had this flag, Valentine's Day flag because we are filming this, we're approaching Valentine's Day. And I just thought it's a nice piece of fabric on a plastic rod with a burlap hanger. You could do anything with it. We're artists, right? So I would not leave it like this, not that I don't like the message on it or anything, but I would cover it up with paint or fabric or paper or something. Popsicle sticks. I do a lot of resin and acrylic pouring and different things. These always come in handy for all sorts of mixing things. I also sometimes, after they get really painy and goopy, save them and then I use that painting goopy stick as an embellishment in some other kind of artwork. Maybe I drill holes in it and put wire in it or I do all kinds of weird things with them, but these, a dollar for how many is in here? 60 of them, that's cheap. They had this wooden arrow. Oops, again, it's on a hanger. I don't know that I'm gonna leave it that way, but they have this new line of craft supplies, including some paints. I got some footage of that that I'm gonna assume at this point that you've seen earlier. This was hanging there. I was gonna just go right by it and I saw this arrow and thought, hmm, that's interesting, let's grab that. In that same aisle, they had some wood shapes. They had some egg shapes, because Easter is also out. Not that I'll use them for that, but these would be cute on paperclips. So I bought some of that. There is five of them for a dollar, so that's inexpensive. This has 10 flower-shaped wooden pieces. Again, I do a lot of the art paperclips. These would be cute for that. You also could paint either one of these up, collage on them, do all kinds of things on them. Use them as journal covers, use them as an embellishment on a page, use them as a tag. I do have a Dremel drill, so I could punch a hole in there easy. They also have these wooden boards. They're not super big, but they're cute enough to do a small painting on, do a collage on, do some assemblage on, do an acrylic pour on, something like that. They're real cute. Are they the best quality? No, but that doesn't matter. I mean, to create art and have fun, there's a little bit of a few rough edges. If I was gonna do an acrylic pour, I would probably just leave it. Otherwise, I could just take a little bit of sandpaper to that, and it would be just fine. They also had a bunch of these. Now, let's get these out of the way. I got way more than I need at the moment of these, but these are basically just wooden, they're wooden picture things. You hang wooden decor that you hang on the wall. Are they thick, substantial wood? No. Are they good enough to do a little painting on, do some collage on, maybe do a practice acrylic pour on? Yes. You could totally give these a light sanding and a coat of gesso, and then once you do that, you could do anything you wanted over them. So I picked up three of them. They also had these, which I thought were interesting. These are thicker and more substantial, but significantly smaller. Let's see, here we go. But again, they're a wood thing, a wood box. It's already got the hanger on the back. They have burlap and these decorations on them with these nails, these decorative nails. I know this is glued on, but I'm gonna try to get some of this off, and then we can use the board again for painting or pouring on, and if I can get these off in one piece, we can use these for other things. So that's what I bought. Let me fast forward through taking some of this apart and we'll figure out what we're gonna use in our challenge, and I'll be right back. Hi guys, we're here with continuing on with our dollar store challenge. All right, so this was the Valentine's banner that I got, and I took it off of the rod it came with, which actually pulled apart very easily, and the other end is here. So I can just put the string back in maybe at some point, and then the little ball just fits on. Oops, there we go, it just fits on like that. So anyway, I pulled it out and I put the parts aside. I've got a little tray here of some of the parts from some of the stuff I bought at the dollar store off that way. Then I took this and I just wanted to for now use the fabric. Here's our arrow. Now I did an acrylic pour on the arrow, and then whatever paint was left, as you saw in the clip, I spread on here. You can still see some of the Valentine message on here and a little bit of the heart, but you know what? I'm okay with that, and I like the way that looks, and we're not done with this anyway. We're gonna put other stuff on top of it, so we'll see what ends up showing. As far as the arrow, I love, love, love the way the arrow turns out. I did, this is Wednesday evening. It's been drying for a couple of days. I expected to finish this project today, and I had a bunch of life stuff get in the way, and ended up not getting to this at all, until I think it's like seven o'clock at night right now. So all I was able to do was put a couple coats of DecoArt triple thick on here. This is a new jar, and it's cold, but it's dry to the touch. I'm gonna let it dry overnight, and I'm gonna let it finish doing what it needs to do, and then we're gonna continue on taking our arrow and the spanner and creating an interesting unique piece of art out of stuff that we already have, and that we got at the dollar store real cheap, all right? All right, I'll be right back. All right, I think everything is dry now. I of course had to do an acrylic pour, because not only are we doing the dollar store challenge, but I'm trying to use products up that have just been sitting around my art room, and you know, can you say squirrel? Anyway, it's Thursday. I started all of this Sunday or Monday, and the acrylic pour had to dry for a couple of days, and then I put a couple coats of clear on the arrow, and then I got distracted by life and doctor appointments, and anyway, now it's Thursday. So everything is dry. I pulled things off of the cookie sheets they were drying on, and I also pulled off some of the drippings. These are some of the drippings that went onto the parchment paper. These are the drippings that are dry. I might want to use these on the banner. So they're off to the side, and then I just put everything and I did this, and I went, wait, I kind of like that. So that might be what we do with this. I don't know for sure yet, but anyway, the first next thing we need to do is pull all this tape off the back. The reason you do all this tape is it just makes cleaning up your painting when you've done something messy, like acrylic pouring, a little easier. You don't have as much weird drippiness, messiness on the back. It doesn't mean you don't have any, but you don't have as much. So I'm gonna pull, and I left the burlap string on here. I don't know if we're gonna end up meeting it, but I didn't want to take it off because I wasn't sure. I have no plan. I never have a plan. If you've been watching my channel for a while, you know that, or I should say almost never have a plan. I really like to tell a story with my art and I like the story to sort of speak for itself. There are a couple of spots we need to clean up, like this one right here. It's sticking to me. Okay, there we go. There's some pieces of frayed wood. We need to come off. I don't want to come off. So we have the arrow, and I'm not sure if we want to use it like this if I want to put the hanger back in, which I saved. So far we've used $2 of the stuff I bought at Dollar Tree. Our dollar limit was 10 max. So I'm well within the limit. So okay, so now I think we're gonna work on the banner. I'm gonna trim some of the loose threads. And I'm going to use some of the stencils from my Etsy shop. I pulled a few. I don't know which one's exactly I'm gonna use. This is Citrus Feathers. More than likely that's one of the ones I'm gonna use. This is called Fostering Growth. And I pulled this last one because this one is intended to go with this hand. And the plant material was designed so that it sits in the palm of that hand. I don't, I was gonna say I don't know if I'm gonna use those, but I might. Those actually look kinda cool on there. So I might. I also still have some of the burlap next to me, the fabric from the pillows, these pieces of wood from the little frames, and the little brass thumbtacks along with this roll of burlap stuff. So I'm going to fast forward through my process. We'll see where it takes me and I will be right back. Remember when you're doing a challenge like this, use what you have. So if you already have paint in your art room and you already have glue and those kind of materials in your art room, don't go buy them at Dollar Tree. Use what you have. Use shopping at Dollar Tree as a supplement to what you're doing, an easy, inexpensive, affordable way to create art and gather materials and supplies for creating your art and your crafts. All right, I'm gonna fast forward through the process and I'm gonna put some copyrighted music on in the background. You guys will get YouTube music, but anyway, I'll be right back. Okay, it's definitely not dry yet. It's gonna take a little bit for it to dry because I used E6000 to glue the arrow and the board from the little wooden frame and the burl up and stuff to the canvas, but I love the way it turned out. And I also used some E6000 to put these little balls on. Now, I would have loved the arrow to be a little bit more tilted, but it wasn't gonna stick very well with this rod in the way. So we're gonna have it this way, but that's okay, forge your own path. I love the message on here. I can't wait for it to be dry and then find a place here in the art room to hang it up. I used one, two, $3 worth of the $10 worth of stuff that I bought, which is fine. It was $10 or less challenge. I have plenty of bits and pieces I'm gonna be able to use later to make paper clips and all kinds of other things. The dollar store is really a great place to find stuff. Now, I didn't buy painter stencils because I have them, but they do have paint and stencils at Dollar Tree, at least at mine they do. So you could definitely do that. I will leave a couple of links in the description below. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please let me know. There is a bunch of links to the other artists doing this hop with me and this dollar store challenge. Go watch their videos, show them some love. Don't forget to like, share and subscribe. Support the free content here on YouTube and over in the Facebook groups. Not only my content, but theirs, by checking out their descriptions. And if they have an Etsy store, shop in their Etsy store, maybe they have an Amazon affiliate link. Maybe they have a PayPal tip jar, a Patreon or something else. Check out the video description. See how you can support your favorite artists. And don't forget the most important thing. Go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.