Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Around the house

This spring, we moved into a beautiful mid-century brick ranch.  It needed a bit of cleaning up and TLC, but it is a beautiful home and I love, love, love it.

Because it has a mid-century modern design (it was built in 1957), I strongly feel we should enhance that with MCM furniture.  So I was delighted to find this adorable rocker at a local garage sale a couple of weeks ago:
This darling chair is from 1967.  It's in great shape.  It's just the right size for me.  And it goes perfectly in the living room.  Perfection for only ten dollars.

Outside the house, we have a fabulous back yard.  When we moved in it was overgrown but I did a lot of weeding and planted some stuff.  Gardening is a bit like gambling for me, my skills are improving but still somewhat hit or miss.  Things seem to be growing pretty well.
It's been a challenge to work in the yard due to the power of the mosquitoes this year.  They are absolutely crazy-bad.  But we spray and fog the yard so we can still enjoy our backyard oasis.  Maybe someday we'll add on a sunporch.
Something else I love about our house is that it's a walkout, and since I work in the basement, I'm just a few steps away from my beautiful backyard oasis.  Also it's so nice to have windows in my studio.  I have so much more room to make a nice, messy mess, too.  Maybe someday I'll get the studio "finished" and share some pics here, but for now, it's definitely a work in progress.

Enjoy what's left of summer.  I know I will.  It's the most wonderful time of the year.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

A Whole Lotta Making Going On!

Ah, summer, how I love thee!  Afternoons at the pool are our favorite activity.  When I'm not swimming with my little guy, I've been using my weeks off from Farmers Market to get some new inventory ready.  I've been inspired by some new papers:

Boy, do I love that bicycle print.  It comes in other colors and previously I had the green & teal on gray version, but I think I might love this gray & white on black version even more.

I'm also excited to use this leaf-print paper:


I've been working on a new batch of vintage dress-pattern journals this week as well.  These have been a popular item at Market so it was time to make more:

These are much more time-consuming to make than vintage-book journals, because I have to cut the book board, then glue the cover papers to the board...but I really love these.  I hate it when I hear people say how they've thrown away so many old patterns...because even if you aren't going to sew the garment, the artwork on the envelope is beautiful and there are oh so many uses for the pattern tissue.

I'm also doing a few Bingo Books for a customer.  I used to do make a lot of these back when I first started doing shows, but then online sellers really raised their prices on vintage Bingo cards so I don't do so many any more.  These cards actually belonged to my grandparents, and since they weren't heavy chipboard, I just glued them to book board so they would be sturdy enough to make a journal.  These are nice sized, a little bigger than 4 x 6.

So that's what's been going on around here.  I've got one more Saturday to sleep in before I'll be back at the Farmers Market on July 25.  You can find me at 2nd & Court with lots of new stuff.  Come say hi!