Stitch Maynia

There's this fun thing called Stitch Maynia, and a Facebook group that goes along with it. The idea is that you start fifteen new projects in the first fifteen days of May...or a new project for every day of the entire month...or work monogamously on one project the whole time. Every stitcher sets their own rules and it's been a lot of fun to watch over the past month.

I'm a slow stitcher and love huge projects and don't have a lot of extra time right now, so it seemed like a bad idea for me to actually participate. What I did do was make a list of things I'm excited to start and then prune it down to thirty. That meant crossing some off, but I wound up with a list of the thirty patterns and kits I'm most excited about.

And then later that day I stopped by Goodwill and bought a new-to-me kit that immediately went to the top of the list.

Out in the Yard

I moved my busted up ceramic squirrels to a different tree because their previous home is about to become firewood. 

Grandma's ladle of succulents is still thriving and even has a few more plants than it did when I rescued it from her garden before the house sold.

And the birdcage my son made years ago with his great-grandfather is slowly growing more and more rustic.

I also got a new-to-me phone with a much better camera that I'm learning how to use...

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {5/25/18}

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules: 
Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned,  as long as it's about baby quilts. You're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

{Thrift Shop Temptations} Mother's Day Thrifting

My daughter wanted to take me out to lunch for Mother's Day and, through a wonderful series of events, we got to to go up to Portland and spend the entire day all by ourselves digging around in the outlet bins and wandering through Ikea and playing with fancy bath bombs at Lush. We'd planned to stay out all day, because it was a special occasion, and I wound up getting home even later than intended. 

It was a very long, very fun day.

Have I told you that I'm fascinated with toy sewing machines? I was really tempted to bring this one home because it was in its original box with all of the wonderful vintage graphics and completely unrealistic promises of things its young owner would make. Not that I think the girl pictured couldn't make them...I'm just wondering if it could happen with this machine.  

It was that Sew Perfect Cassette that made me put it back, which is stupid because I wasn't going to sew with it anyway....but if it didn't have the cassette it wouldn't look like a sewing machine...

I love this little painted stove (for decoration, not the potential carbon monoxide poisoning) but the price was sky high.

They also had half a dozen Bicentennial coin banks, still in their original cardboard boxes. Maybe someone finally gave up on their potential value as collectibles? I wound up with a coonskin cap for one of the boys (after calling home to confirm that he really did want to wear a real dead raccoon on his head) and a vintage craft book.

The Goodwill Outlet is unpredictable, but the Portland locations are always better then the Salem one. If you're not familiar with the bins, most items are priced by the pound. The first twenty-five pounds are two-something each. More than that is a dollar twenty nine, so on a good day, you wind up in an odd limbo where buying more stuff costs you less. That stupid limbo is where I wind up making bad decisions.

But before we get to those, let me show you what there was to be tempted by. This was my second vintage margarine tub of the day (guessing they came from the same old lady) and I was tickled pink that it actually had the tight yarn curls still inside. My Instagram feed makes me want things like this, but my daughter talked me out of it and  that's probably for the best.

There were stitches to be saved, but I didn't grab this one.

Or this one, which was the first dumb decision of the day. At the last minute, we had to add five pounds to save eight dollars. It's not my taste, but I could have picked it up for free and handed it over to a friend who resells things like this.

This one did come home with me because  it's needlepoint and pretty and I'm not making that mistake again. It's not in the back of my car, though, so I'm hoping it got mixed in with my daughter's haul and not stolen from our cart.

There was also a gorgeous cross stitched tablecloth with red dragons that my daughter happily snatched up to re-purpose as a birdcage cover. And another little toy sewing machine....which I could have thrown into our money saving limbo but didn't because I'd forgotten about it by then.

If you think you might want it, put it in your cart then and there -- and remember to take it out again if you don't need the extra pounds! I should know this by now.

I want to save all of the antique baby pictures and this one was only seven dollars, but the frame was made from some sort of pressed material and absolutely crumbling at the edges and she'd take up a ton of wall space.... but those eyes!

These three did follow me home because they were little and inexpensive and completely and totally captured my imagination. The cabin and campfire absolutely need to live in my old farmhouse with me. The mountains might...or I might need to reuse their frame for a reproduction sampler.

We also bought a whole lot of clothes, but I'm assuming you don't care to see my new-to-me Hawaii t-shirts.