Weekend Thrifty Finds

It's time for more brag-- I mean, sharing concerning last weekend's thrifty finds. I hit up one ginormous estate sale and a medium-sized flea market. The flea market yielded a $10 cordless weed eater (yay!) with a charger power cord (yay!)... that turned out to be from an old school Nintendo (booo!). That was exciting. "Why isn't it charged yet?" "Maybe the battery is shot?" "...Well, there's yer problem!" An actual charger was ordered and is on its way.

The estate sale, however. My goodness. There was so. much. stuff. Everywhere. Stuff. I came home with about half what I could have, including:


Records. I can't decide whether to keep Mama Cass or give her to Becky. (I mean, I would give it to Becky without question if she had a record player, but...)



Books for turning into journals. I've actually made a journal from another copy of that same edition Little Women, and it sold, so I figured, "Hey, why not?"



Build your own stamp set. After finding that toy printing press last week, I think I'm obsessed.




Big-ass pot. (Excuse my language, but that's really the best way to describe it.) I'm seeing insane amounts of turkey stock, and beer. But not at the same time.



For scale.

(That is, either to show you how big the pot is, or how skinny my babby is, or both.)

Craft Room, part 3

In case you're new to this blog, I recently moved and gained a craft room. (Yay!) However, I have a three-month-old daughter, so it is taking me an inordinate amount of time to get it all organized. (Boooo!) So I've been posting update photos. The first two posts are here and here.

The major improvements lately are
1.) The middle of the floor is almost completely clear, which means everything but the fabric is almost completely put away (which isn't saying too much, considering the massive amounts of fabric currently living in the garage.)
and
2.) Pretty ribbon holders!

Niiiice...

I took 12" dowel rods that I found with the cake decorating supplies at Walmart, cut slits into the ends with a jigsaw (actually, the husband did that part), and basically made a triangle around the dowel out of string. The string slips into the slits on the ends of the dowels, and then ties in a knot at the top.


And here is the famous Britney Spears shelf (because it's tall, thin, and shallow). Har dee har har. Come to think of it, we should really update our pop culture references... Any suggestions?

Blog mentions

Here's the latest (short) round-up of blog mentions for my Etsy shop:

An interview I did for this ephemera blog.

My board game coasters were picked for this post of Monopoly cuteness!

Yay!


(Complete side note: As I typed the word "round-up", I felt a surge of anger, due to the fact that I just watched this documentary.)

Estate Sale scores!

The husband, the babby, and I hit up the Farm Market and two estate sales this weekend (or as we like to call them, "Estáte Sáles!" as if it were Spanish, and we were the Unconscious Argentinean). I was completely unprepared for the absolute haul we came away with. Observe:

i
A picture collage frame (I had been looking for one) and an amateurish painting in an awesome frame, which will be spray-painted black (the frame, not the painting) in order to display some art we got for our wedding (that was over 3 years ago). Yeah. It's about time. $3 each.



Embroidered table runner (50 cents), Sister Act (love it!) (25 cents), and a 1952 yearbook. Yearbook = major score. It was originally $15, but while we were browsing, the man announced everything was 75% off. Hello, $3.75!



And at that same sale, the husband found pipes. Soooo many pipes. Every time I walk into any type of sale and he stays in the car, he says, "If you see any pipes in there, let me know!" Well, he found these. They were originally $20 and $25, down to a total of $22.50. He only had $10. We were in the process of negotiating a loan when the man announced the 75% off. I gladly gave him the extra $1.25. Oh, and the ties are: jogging man, baseball player, sail boats. Husband has claimed the boats, but the other two will probably end up in crafts. ($1 each)



Hello, gorgeous! Sunbeam mixer with two bowls, juicer attachment, and manual. I made a bee line to this thing, lugged it to an outlet, and plugged it in. Success! Nothing was priced at this sale, so I nonchalantly asked how much. $10. I will take it.



Box of rick rack (50 cents).



And here's the most fun acquisition of the day, in my opinion -- a toy printing press! I saw this box of stuff in the garage and asked the kind man for a price. He said, "Do you know what this is?" I said, "Yes." He then said things like, "This thing is great. There's still ink in there! We had a lot of fun with that." I told him it looked like a lot of fun. He said, "I don't know how much that would go for in the right place, but you can have it for $5." Sold! Are you kidding me? I would have killed for something like this as a 7 year old.





It's got ink and little letters and trays to stick in the press and tweezers and paper. It's fabulous.



I made it work! Hello!

My New Kitchen

And by "new" I mean that I moved, so it's new to me. Not remodeled or anything. I made putting the kitchen together a priority when we got here, because an un-put-together kitchen gets very expensive (in dinners out) very quickly. So it's been like this awhile, but I thought I'd finally take photos and show it to you.


Here's the view from the living room. Spacious, no?


The pantry. I have a pantry! I've gotta be honest -- it was a major selling point (renting point?) for me. It's certainly not put to its full use at the moment though.


I love magnetic poetry. Some children-friends of ours put the words on the fridge for me. A little haphazard, but if I had had to do it myself, they'd all still be in a ziplock bag.


Little cookbook shelf. The two most important books in my life right now are on the top: The Baby Book and Nourishing Traditions. ("Hippie!")


A very moody photo of the window above the sink. Herbs!


And here is my collection of fake plants above the window above the sink. I cannot get enough of these crazy, 3D embroidery houseplant portraits. Seriously. If you ever see one, buy it for me and I'll reimburse you.


My collection of jars. It's getting a tad out of hand. And this isn't including the 10 or so jars full of kombucha in the fridge, or the 8 or so jars I just took out to put my button collection in.


The view out the window. Laundry, FTW!

Alert! Ridiculous cuteness ahead!

I try to keep this blog to crafty topics -- or at the very least, thrifty and/or creative home management topics. But since most of what I've been working on for the last 3 months is my baby, I thought I'd share her first two and a half months with you.


The morning after she was born.


Asleep after eating


Baby yawns are the cutest things ever.


The baby acne was vicious.


Peek!


"Wake up, Daddy!"


"Arrrr!"


With her favorite Kelly at the church picnic


In her favorite onesie from Grandma Katie.


Frustrated at her own lack of crawling skills


Before a bath -- she has no idea what is about to befall her.


As Daddy says, "OM nom nom!"

Craft Room, Part 2

As promised, here are the photos that I took of the craft room yesterday. The first photos can be seen here.


I put some more stuff on the desk hutch, and moved some plastic drawers out of the corner.



Cleared some stuff off the giant shelf, and got my yarn collection into those drawers in the corner.



Moved the shipping supplies in the closet over to make room for the tower of plastic drawers. Hopefully they will eventually hold all my finished inventory.

The big thing I did last night (that you won't be able to see in photos) was moving all the fabric to the garage and all the everything else into the craft room. I decided that I would put everything besides fabric in place and then fill in the holes with fabric. Otherwise there were just too many options.

More progress reports as progress happens -- the sewing machine should go up soon!

Craft room!

What's that you say? You haven't heard from me in two months? Well, I hope you'll forgive me when I explain that I had a baby and moved across town. Now, in my time in Norman, OK, I've moved across town four different times, but this was very different. Babby means that just keeping the new (nicer, bigger) house clean takes up a lot of my free time. So although we've been here for over a month, there are still quite a few boxes lounging about.

However, this last weekend my fabulous husband got all the furniture in my craft room (!!!) in place. This means I can get everything else in order in little bits and pieces as I have time. Which means you -- you lucky blog reader, you -- get to watch the progress as it unfolds.

I should've taken photos before, when everything was just piled in there, but it was really depressing to look at.

So here's the first set of photos:


Looking across the room from the door







This is everything that was done by Monday night. Tomorrow I'll post the photos I took this morning.