W.I.P. Friday and Bonus Thrift-o-rama!

I joined a postcard swap hosted by the lovely and talented Andrea and I'm feeling like I've so little time to cut and paste. But, I managed to get four of my 12 cards done this week. The very loose theme of the swap is "summer," and I've taken on a mini-theme of "summer reading," taking most of my material from this really weird kids book that I bought at a garage sale last week. I kind of like them.


Speaking of garage sales, there has been a very tiny bit of thrifting over here. Ruby likes the adventure of hitting the garage sales, since there's usually a toy or two to be found, so we hit the road on Saturday without so much as a map or a newspaper to point us to the goods. When I was a kid I was obsessed with Royal Doulton-style figurines, so I've decided to start Ruby a collection of prissy ceramic dolls for when she's older. Hence the fancy porcelain lady you see. Then, just today, I happened upon this milk glass pie plate, which is exactly the kind of thing I go nuts for. I'm finding the milk glass pieces few and far between in garage sale land, so I was happy to snap it up.


And, from a church garage sale last week, a couple issues of McCall's Needework & Crafts -- one from 1963, the other from 1966. Check out the Wilma Flintstone chic!

Message In A Bottle

In a bout of creative insanity, I joined a Valentine's Postcard Swap on Flickr. I've been feeling a little intimidated because I'm not really a visual artist -- I'm not even a scrapbooker (and I admit, I despise the fact that "scrapbook" has become a verb -- but I like cutting and pasting things and with my knitting being kind of long-term and boring these days, I felt the need to explore another side of my creativity. Plus, I loooove Valentine's Day and since Aaron isn't the most willing participant, I had to get the lace doilies and hearts out of my system somehow, right?

So, I stuck to a couple of themes: old romance novels and vintage '70s Valentine cards (comb your dollar stores people -- you can still find the punch outs you had as a kid if you're lucky). Since I'm new to this kind of thing, there was a lot of trial and error, but I had a lot of fun.


I still have a couple more to make -- I think they'll be in the same style as the purple tissue paper/old valentine card ones. I mailed my first batch off yesterday -- I can hardly wait to see what comes my way in the following week or so. Hooray for swaps!