The Return of Thrifty Thursday!

To be honest, for a while there last year I had lost my drive to thrift. We were growing out of our little apartment so fast that I just couldn’t enjoy going to the shops and sales while knowing that anything we brought home would just add to the clutter. But now! Oh now, we have this huge space, double the size of our old apartment, and I actually need to thrift for furniture and art and whatnot. My drive is back! Over the past few weekends, I’ve come home with so many wonderful finds. This time, I’m going to be smarter about it though. I’m going to start adding some of my finds to my etsy shop. For instance, I’ve come home with several wonderful pyrex dishes, so I added two to my shop and am keeping this one:

Happy Hunting!

 

Thursday

My whole life, I’ve enjoyed garage sales. I can’t say the same about thrift stores as there was a time when I very much resented my mother dragging me around thrift stores in search of clothes. Garage sales are different. They are personal. It’s akin to rummaging through your friend’s medicine cabinet during a dinner party. It’s an opportunity to peak into the life of the sellers that you would else never have. Estate sales are the best; wandering through somebody’s house, room to room, and able to rummage through all the drawers. It’s like a sociological treasure hunt.

Last weekend, we just went to a few garage sales, but one was particularly fulfilling. When we drove up, the first thing I noticed were books. They had boxes and boxes of books. Sometimes you think you’ve found a gem like that and they end up being all romance novels or something, but these were good books. It was as if they had tailored the selection to my tastes: classics, cookbooks, science, even a few math books! I came away with a nice selection and Boy got to laugh at me and my fetish.

             

Sorting through everything they had to offer, I was thinking about how easily we could be friends with these people, despite the decades that surely lie between us and them. Just when it couldn’t get any better, I found a table of textiles hidden inside the garage from the ill-foreboding skies. One of the women tending the sale explained that all of the textiles  had a story behind them, were bought during various adventures. A lot had been picked through, but when I saw this, I fell in love. This fabric was from Africa, country unknown, hand embroidered in swirling stitches of vibrant greens, pinks, oranges, and black, and quilted. It’s bunched up, by design or mishap, I don’t know, but I like it that way.

It’s approximately 36″x48″ and surprisingly matches our green (hand me down) sofas. Someday, it will hang on the wall, but I haven’t yet decided how best to go about that. Oh, we payed $3 for it.

And the summer full of garage sales has just begun.

 

Wednesday Works In Progress

My boyfriend is always chiding me about my ever growing list of things to do. Sometimes he gets brave and tries to stand between me and a new item for the list. It’s cute really, though it rarely works. How thoughtful he is that he doesn’t want my to-do list to become overwhelming, or perhaps he’s just tired of having one finished curtain hanging in our front window, while the other four lie in wait in my box of sewing projects.

Of course, at the moment, I have too many wip’s and not enough fo’s, which doesn’t particularly make great fodder for the blogging cannon (a wip in itself). Nonetheless, I’ve decided that Wednesday will become Works In Progress day in hopes that it will help keep, or revive, my interest in projects lost to the box of doom. Here it goes:

I recently stumbled upon this blog, Judaica Journal, and it had me wondering why I don’t do more Jewish crafts. So I promptly began this hamsa embroidery to be mounted on some wall in our home sometime in the future:

A hamsa is a traditional symbol amongst both Jews and Arabs. It sometimes represents the hand of God and is used as a protecting talisman. Also, because it is something that Jews and Arabs share in common, it has become a symbol for peace in the Middle East. The text is the first lines of an important Jewish prayer, the Shema, in gold cotton. The design will be several shades of blue and mostly free form.

Number deux on the to-do list is to finish painting and recovering the new dining chairs, that we got for free from Craigslist. When my boyfriend first moved into the apartment, we bought the coolest table from Ikea, but skimped on the chairs. For several months we were using a combination of wood folding chairs and cheap balsa-like wood chairs that came with a table (my current desk) from Target (all for $19.99, so you can imagine the quality). So we’re very happy to have new comfy chairs, or will be, at least, once they become fo’s.

They came to us a lovely reddish brown covered with creamy fleur de lis fabric and complementary stains. They are otherwise in wonderful shape. So, we bought some darker brown paint and will be using our older curtains to cover them. All in all, we’ve spent approximately $15 on a set of four dining chairs. The chairs that I was eying to buy were at the very least $50 a pop (and I probably still would have recovered them), so we saved about $185. Pretty darned good, I think. Now, if I would just finish this and the curtains, our living/dining area would look completely different.

Thus concludes Wednesday Works In Progress #1. It’s time to go sit by the pool with some lemonade.

 

Thrifty Thursday and Confessions of a Bookaholic

I’ve been holding on to this post just so it could be a thrifty Thursday, and finally it’s here.

I have caved in and decided to start repurposing linens. The thought of making a dress out of some stranger’s sheet used to sound a bit weird and gross to me, but Value Village was having half off linens and there were such wonderful colors and perfectly light fabric for summer dresses that I couldn’t resist. The right most fabric, a beautiful sheet, will become a dress or a skirt and shirt set, I haven’t decided yet. Next to it, the pink floral pillowcase will become the lining for a market bag I have in mind. Above is another pillow case with a Huge Flower (18″x23″!). I’m not sure what to do with that, perhaps it will become a purse or tote bad.

The white linens, I must admit, were not thrifts at all, but they are indeed wonderful finds. I found them deep in the linen closet. They hail from Russia. The sheet still had the tag, written in Russian, although I couldn’t read it. Neither Boy nor I could make out with the monogram is supposed to be. (He speaks fluent Russian, having spent half his life there. I’m certainly not fluent, but I know my share. Sometimes the stylized letters are just difficult to make out.) My guess is that it is a ‘G’, or the Russian equivalent anyways (’Г’, not sure if that letter is readable for you), but it doesn’t really look like it at all. The pillowcases are large and square with embroidery in each corner. They are all could use a good washing with bleach, but I must find a way to get these out of the cupboard.

 

Last weekend was Half Price Books’ warehouse sale. Books for $1 or less! It wasn’t actually as great as the friends of the library sale a few months ago. It was good though. I came home with seven lovelies:

Titles include:

• Creative Ribbon Embroidery Salli Van Rensburg
• Creative Folk Art Sue Iliov
• Basic Photography, a text book pre-digital, but certainly with a thing or two to teach me
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume 1, but I already own this in hardback. I mistakenly thought it was volume 2, oy.
• Angela’s Ashes Frank McCourt
• Running With Scissors Augusten Burroughs
• CRAVE Seattle, I’ve flipped through this many times before, lot’s of useful information

In addition to these great finds, I currently have no fewer than twenty titles checked out from the library! Ack. I have a really difficult time walking away from books. In my defense, a lot of the library books are quick reads and inspiration. Also, I was being rushed during the last trip and didn’t have time to ‘edit’ my selection of books.

Well, that about sums it up. Be sure to visit the Thrifty Thursday group on Flickr.

 

Thrift

I’ve been trying to post my recent finds, but for one reason or another haven’t. So, this will be short and sweet and to the point.

Saturday:

• From Craigslist Freebies:
  • One set of iron dining chairs (not pictured, well the corner sorta made it in above), needing only a recovering and paint job.
• From various garage sales en route to freebie chairs:
  • three ikea frames $1.00
  • One box of fabrics from a quilter to expand stash (pictured above) $5

Monday:

• Via ValueVillage 1/2 off Memorial Day Sale, total ~$8:
  • Two Pryex bowls and a casserole dish reminiscent of my Granny’s kitchen
  • One glass coffee mug with a cool retro design (I swear my granny had a few of these)
  • one teacup with bird (i Want the rest of the set!)
  • one 6″ embroidery hoop (not shown)
  • one plaid tablecloth

All told, I think it’s safe to say that I quite enjoyed this aspect of my weekend.