Pink Roses

goodwill part 2...

My lovely assistant will now help me display my finds from Goodwill.  Oh wait, that's right, she WON'T help...she will sniff everything, and knock it over right when I'm getting ready to take a picture.  She will GET IN every picture.  She will use the ornaments as cat toys.  That's right. Silly me. But she is lovely...

I bought 3 bags of Christmas stuff (2.02 each), they had a lot of junk in them, but some keepers...

Old glass ornaments, an angel and a glass tree topper...amazingly not broken!

a pair of Napco angel figurines were in the bag...tags still on the bottom...they are tiny and so cute...I love the little birds!

This tinsel star tree topper, and shiny ornaments were a big hit with the cat...and then there were the books...

I love old books, but a bad thing happened to me in the book section.  A man was standing near me looking at books. 

He glanced at me and said

"you should come here on Mondays"

why Monday's? I asked

"because they give a SENIOR CITIZENS discount"

 

I stared the "death stare" at him for a moment

(the one I use on my son)

and said, in a slightly loud voice...

I'M NOT THAT OLD!

I quickly left the book section with a few books and a shred of my dignity...

here's a topic...I was BORN in 1960, and while this does make me old, I am not yet qualified for AARP or medicare or a Goodwill discount...thank you very much...

I did find a french book...I've been looking for a while.  I wanted  French paper for collage work...it's a school book, so hopefully there are no inappropriate words in there!

I also found a beginning dictionary with really large type...again a fun collage resource.

A book of garden flowers...page after page of ROSES!  I hate to cut this up, but I think I might have to...

I bought 2 Hardy Boys books, just so my Nancy Drews' can have a date to the prom...

And the book "FUN...for one or two", that gives you great ideas on how to have fun by yourself, or with a friend...

Start a Collection.  Now why didn't I think of that?  Now if you could all just send me a thumbprint...

a fat stack...

Today at Goodwill I bought a bag of these little diamond shaped tartlet tins...I didn't know what they were called, I had to look it up on Google...they were made in Sweden.  I paid $2.02 for 33 of these... why does Goodwill have such odd prices?..that's about 6 cents a piece...

A fat stack as my son would say...

I am sure they will never be used for baking in this house, so I will just add them to the hodge-podge of creative junk in my studio....however, they are rather photogenic...you might be seeing them around...

It was a very good thrifting day...I'll show you the rest of the mess (Christmas items and books) later on...

strange or sentimental?

I have three clocks that sit on a shelf above my desk in the office.  They are all broken. The man that sold them to me years ago at a garage sale made sure I understood that...

those are broken you know...

yes sir

they don't work...

that's O.K.

I mean, I tried to fix them...

it's alright, I'm just using them for decoration

I don't know why anyone would want to decorate

with a broken clock...

 

here they are in their natural habitat...

So the secret is this...They represent me and my children, and I have the time on each one set for our birthday...

Christopher: March 15 = 3:15

Me: October 3 = 10:03

Elizabeth: April 24 = 4:24

Every time I look at the 3 of "us" it makes me happy.

Is that strange or sentimental?

art heart swap...

I signed up for a couple of swaps this Valentine's Day. This is for an Art Heart Swap

being hosted by Melissa McCobb Hubbell,

on her blog, The Garden of Pink Shadows.

Melissa is featured in this months Somerset Life magazine, and also has the honor of being named one of Somerset's "Bonnes Vivante" guest artists.  She announced this good news after I had signed up for the swap.  I would have been too intimidated at the thought of swapping with her, and never signed up if I had known!  So, I gave it my best.  There are 20 people participating, and I am sending in 3 swaps, and will receive 3 swaps in return.

I finally finished them this weekend, and have to get them in the mail today, so I took a few pictures before I wrapped them...

I used some of the flowers from that old hat I showed you the other day...and the photo holders came from an old photo album I bought on Ebay...

It is a cute little size, holds a 3x5 photo, and has a great leather cover, and brass latch that I love.

It was empty, no photos, so it was a good price.  I just bought it for the pages. Lots of projects waiting to happen...now I'm off to the Post Office...

thank you...

I wanted to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all the kind comments and emails I received after my last post.  I was overwhelmed with the kindness and love and support you all gave me.  I almost didn't write that post.  I'm sure glad I did!

P.S.I finally got MOO cards! (www.moo.com)

I'm OK...

Here's a picture of me today.

The picture I have up there in the corner of my blog was taken one year ago today. 

The day I got a divorce. 

I wore a black turtleneck, because I wanted to scrapbook the picture and journal all over it with a white pen.  Words of affirmation...like you are going to be OK.

A year has passed and I am on a journey to discover who I am, not as a daughter or sister or mother or wife.  But as a woman, a person...me.  After 28 years with the same man, I had lost my individuality.

This year has been filled with so many things, so many emotions...good & bad, high & low. Nights I could not sleep, and days I could not get out of bed.  But there have been amazing things too...I am feeling creative again for the first time in years. 

My husband was and is a good man.  I have nothing bad to say.  He is still my friend.  We just grew apart.  I tried my best to keep us together.

This blog is my journey, and I'm grateful to you for sharing it with me.  I am OK.

company's coming...

I'm in a bit of a cleaning frenzy.  Elizabeth is coming home from school tomorrow for the weekend, and she is bringing 3 of her friends with her.  3 friends that have never been to our house.  3 friends that will want a place to sleep.  My guest bedroom is the biggest of all my bedrooms, technically a bonus room I guess, but it's big...and full of stuff.  It's so easy to put stuff in there and just close the door and forget about it.  Bags for Goodwill.  Boxes of pictures. When company comes I go into panic mode. 

I redecorated the Guest bedroom several years ago and was quite happy with it.  It was BEAUTIFUL for about a week.  Then I started junking it up again.  I got my inspiration from this velvet jewelry box I bought at Anthropologie.  I had the walls painted a soft blue (its actually called Wedgwood Gray), and used a mix of blues and browns...damask, velvet, satin, silk, for the bedding and accessories...

velvet drapes with pretty tassels...

It is very peaceful and serene...

You see not everything in my house has pink roses!

  I just put on clean sheets that smell like lavender and vanilla, and added a down comforter.  Now to finish moving some boxes and making a grocery list.  There's nothing like company to get me motivated!

cheap thrills...

If you know one thing about me, and my scavenging ways, you know that the cheaper something is, the happier I am.  I don't have a formal sliding scale on this cost/happiness ratio, but if I did, it would be something like this:

FREE..................Exuberant...I will do a spastic dance

$1.00 (or less).....Ecstatic...I will most likely hug you

You get the picture.

So anyway...here's a little beauty I bought on Ebay for 99cents...an old hat...

I was not Ecstatic due to the $4.50 shipping, but wait...there's more...

I took the hat apart and ended up with 18 roses...cost per rose-about 5 cents.  And if I said it was "vintage millinery" the price would go way up!

  I think I am going to try to dye some of them a different color...I'll go out on a limb and say...pink.

This piece of netting will sit around for the next decade, but eventually be incorporated into something...

and now the best part...look what happened when I turned the leftover hat form upside down...

 

a crown! 

That's a lot of happy for 99 cents!

You should have seen the spastic dancing...

Prom, and more...

Would you go to the prom with this boy? 

Heck, I know I would. 

Prom was one of the MANY topics we covered while on our 11 hour college visit trip together on Thursday.  He and I alone in the car for 7 hours.  Lunch and dinner together.  Touring the campus. You don't get that much time one-on-one with a 17 year old very often.  I used my time wisely to interrogate talk to him about just about everything. 

When he was much younger (elementary school), and I needed to really talk to him, I would take him somewhere to eat after school.  We usually went to Dairy Queen, and as he sat there across from me, eating a large chocolate extreme/mud pie Blizzard, in a don't-tell-your-sister-we-came-without-her secret way, he would talk.  He would be so excited, eating a treat 2 hours before dinner, that he would tell me anything and everything.

It still works. 

Sitting across the table from him at a Cracker Barrel eating lunch, watching him eat 3 orders of Chicken and Dumplings (yes he ate it all), we talked about school and college, leaving home, friends that were making bad decisions, why he wasn't going to make bad decisions (I will kill him), girls and prom. 

It seems that everyone has been in a frenzy to ask dates to Prom, which is in March.  It also is the trend to ask a girl in a clever way.  Some boys wrote PROM across their chest and showed up on a girls doorstep without a shirt on.  One boy asked on the morning announcements at school.  I suggested making a cupcake and writing PROM on it with frosting.  He didn't like that one, but he did want to make her something, so that it would be different from anyone else.  After much thought he/we came up with this...

He decided to make her a bracelet. 

How much do I love him?

Friday after school we got out my meager jewelry making supplies...

and he made the bracelet himself.  I showed him how to pinch the crimper-things (a technical term) with pliers and attach the clasp, and he picked out the beads and made it.  He wrapped it up and gave it to her on Friday night at the High School basketball game.  He was very proud of himself, and she loved it, and wore it, and showed all her friends.  And oh...

she said YES!

crack heads...

One morning, about 11 years ago, my friend Andrea showed up at my house carrying this suitcase.  She had been on a walk and found it in someone's trash, and knew I would like it. Reason #437 of why I love Andrea: she garbage-picks for me! (She also found the shutters I used to make my bed, that I wrote about here.) When she picked the suitcase up, it was heavy, so she opened it to see what was inside...

Four old baby dolls!  Actually 3 dolls and a head.  She said she thought it was creepy, but if anyone would know what to do with them-it would be me. Well, the doll heads completely creeped out my kids, so I have never done anything with them.  In fact I forgot about them until about a year ago when I started seeing them used in art and decorating on a few blogs.  Today I wanted to try out my new camera, so I got them down from their shelf in the basement, and made them model for me...

 

   

My son says they are still creepy.  I guess they'll go back on that shelf for another 10 years...