Aunt Mae's Treasures

If you asked my brother Tim if I'd rather get something new or be given something old, he'd immediately sigh and choose the older option. He has never understood my fascination with things from the past. I wouldn't call them antiques because that will give them a certain air of value or quality. I appreciate worthless crap too.
When my Great Aunt Mae died earlier this year and our family started cleaning up her house, I jumped at the chance to take things no one else wanted. Specifically crafty things. Sewing, knitting, that kinda stuff. I knew my aunt shared my love of crafting, so I figured I might get a few pieces. Little did I know...

...I'd inherited an entire closet worth of stuff. And yes, since you asked, my grandmother IS holding an alphabet stencil ruler. Aren't I lucky to be the proud owner of that priceless gem now?
But in all seriousness, I gained quite a few things that I am more than excited about.

These cameos belonged to my Great Great Aunt Hannah. (Pure coincidence that we share a name. It was not intentional of my parents.) The sticker says genuine cameo and I have no idea what that means, but these are just beautiful.

This is a shoebox full of nothing but zippers. I don't know what I'll do with them, but they're way too great to not hold on to. The zipper lying on top with the orange sticker on it was originally 19 cents. That sale sticker says its reduced to 10 cents. Talk about a bargin!

This cardboard cutting board is 6 feet wide. You can still find these, and fairly inexpensively, but the logo on it is the best part.

PieceGoods was my mom's first job. I'm fairly certain they don't exist anymore. I tried to do some Google research and found nothing. There's a facebook group for it, but the last anyone mentions seeing one was in 1997.

This is one of my most prized additions. I just can't handle how cute this instruction manual is. I want to frame it. But seriously.

I've saved the best for (almost) last. This was what I was most excited about. A dress form. She'll need a name, so if you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it. That dress she's wearing comes off and I can adjust her a million different ways until her shape almost identically matches mine. I haven't figured out how to use her yet, but once I do, she'll be my new best friend.

This bucket was another exciting acquisiton. (I think I've said that about every one of them now.) It's from my grandmother, not my great aunt. It's a large tin, filled to the top with buttons. Hundreds of buttons. Years and years of saving those extra buttons that come with clothes. I've always thought that jars of buttons are about as perfect as crafting life comes, so when I saw this bucket, I fell in love and started planning.

Someday...

I knew I needed to divide them, so I grabbed cups and labeled.

I started with 12 different colors, thinking that would be enough, but by the time I finished, I'd expanded to 16 categories.

Black, silver, gold, brown, red, orange, yellow, white, green, blue, navy, cream, purple, pink, wood, and clear. There are some truly amazing buttons in there. And I learned a lot about how organized my aunt was by sorting them.

A lot of the buttons were still inside these paper envelopes and she had written the corresponding outfit on the paper. I have no idea if that was the original intention of the paper envelope, but I think it's pretty brilliant.

Some of the buttons that were still attached to their original boards I left alone. 29 cents for 6 buttons? How times have changed...



For those of you who have held on through that trip back in time... I have a future project to share.

This Christmas tree hangs on my grandmother's wall all year. I am so in love with the idea. The entire tree is made of old jewelry. Good jewelry that has seen better days. An earring without a mate. A pin missing a few stones. Beautiful pieces.

It's so fun to look at. You always see something new. In the lower corner of this picture you can see an owl. When I first joined Kappa and noticed the owls, I tried to count all the owls on the tree, but every time I came up with a different number because I'd find a new one, or forget where one was hidden. If you look, you can made out a telephone pin. My grandmother worked for a telephone company for years. There are at least 4 telephone in the tree. It's just such a unique piece.
When I told my grandmother that I wanted to start collecting pieces for my own, she gave me about half a sandwich bag of old jewelry to start with. She said I'll need more than a shoebox worth before I'm done, but it's a good start! She also said that people donated a lot of the pieces when they heard what she was doing. They'd rather it go to her art than to a garage sale.
So I'm sending out the same plea. If you have any old, lonely, broken jewelry that would otherwise find it's way to the nearest Goodwill, send it my way. I'm thinking of making a big crown instead of a tree. The whole thing will sparkle. It will be glorious.

Grow A Little Garden

I've decided to give SC a little time to move in and unpack before I show the world her apartment. (But the wait will be worth it, trust me.)

So in the meantime, a little something else... Gardening. :)

I love sunflowers and every summer when I was little my mom and I would plant sunflowers outside my window and cross our fingers they would grow. They usually did, but I think it had more to do with luck and the hardiness of the flowers than our gardening skill. I tried other flowers later, but my attention span was too short and their growing time too long. Usually I'd forget I even planted something after a few days and mom would have to deal with the mess I left.

So understandably when I told her last summer that I wanted to garden, she was skeptical. But I was determined. I wanted a vegetable garden.

I started with jalapenos, and they did so well and I saw growth so quickly that I HAD to grow more.

So my garden grew to include cherry tomatoes, regular tomatoes, bell peppers and cucumbers.

They grew better than I had ever dreamed. I felt like a real gardener.

I was so proud of my first tomato! But unfortunately I only got a handful of tomatoes and never got bell peppers or cucumbers. They grew, they just never matured.

I got a million jalapenos though! By the end of summer, my family was sick of eating Mexican food. (And that's saying something for us.)


I wanted to garden again this summer, but I wanted to give flowers a try. (A few weeks later and they aren't doing so great, but let's pretend you don't know that.)

I started with all the basics. A planter with a thick row of rocks at the bottom for drainage then good soil, a watering can, a shovel and a hoe, and a set of gloves. Notice they all match. All encouragment purchases from my mom. She knows me well. Haha.

I knew that my balcony gets a lot of sun, more than 6 hours a day, so when I went to pick out flowers I made sure to get full sun flowers. While some of the shady flowers were pretty, I knew they'd never last in the hot sun. That'd be like getting a Husky and moving to Ecuador. It's just not gonna work out. Flowers have to match the sunlight levels.
I decided on Dahlias because I just love them, Marigolds for color and Salvia for height.

Leaving them in their containers, I set them in the planter and moved them around until I liked the arrangement. It's way easier to try it out this way than after the containers have been removed.

Once I liked the placement, I marked where they were in the dirt, shoveled it out to make space, planted the flowers and then filled in with the extra dirt.

And then I sat back and enjoyed the beauty of the flowers. :)

Now if only I can keep them alive....

SC's Apartment: Part 1

This weekend marked the beginning of a big journey for my dear friend, SC... she's moving into her very own apartment! She got the keys earlier this week and we spent part of Friday, most of Saturday and a good chunk of Sunday cleaning and painting. And while she has a lot of moving and decorating to do, she's got a good start on a perfect little place.

I made her pick something to get us started on a design direction and this is what we decided on. We call it Vintage Americana. So this would be the inspiration for her kitchen and living room, while her bedroom is gonna be what we call Vintage Romantic. (Fun fact: Giving your spaces descriptive names like 'vintage americana' helps to make decisions. While looking at something, you can always ask yourself, is this vintage americana, or do I just think it's pretty but it would be better suited elsewhere?)

Welcome to the most adorable building in all of Atlanta.

Her kitchen. We knew (aka: I knew and told her) almost immediately that those shelves would have to go. While she is short on storage space, those shelves are ugly, not very usable, and potentially hazardous to anyone above 5'8". Luckily SC agreed with me and we took them down.

Her dining room. It's the other end of her kitchen and it's a great size for a little table. There's a light, a fan and a beautiful big window. Not much else you can ask for.

One corner of her living room. That door opens on to a little balcony. It's not big enough for furniture, but it's cute. And again big windows. The place has great light. And don't miss the hardwood floors. Lucky, lucky.

Corner of the bedroom. More windows. Lucky girl. These pictures will be way more interesting once there's furniture in the place.

Other fun little facts that I didn't get good pictures of: All the door knobs are the old crystal knobs. So gorgeous. And the place is from like the 1920's, so there are odd things like compartments where the iceman used to leave ice blocks. Just adorable.

(This is SC!)
We started by taking down everything we knew we wouldn't want, like those awful shelves in the kitchen, and cleaned and spackled. When I first told SC to get spackle, she was like, "wait, what? I have to spackle?" Haha. I'm so grateful now for the experience of having renovated my grandparents' home and the knowledge of minor home repairs I gained there. I got to share some with SC this weekend.

I went through and did most of the edging. (SC did some and did fabulously!)  Edging is NOT easy and takes a lot of practice to get good at. I have a few pointers though.

EDGING POINTERS!
- Don't use blue painter's tape unless you have to! Painter's tape is a great invention, but too many times it fails to give that crisp line I'm looking for. Bleeding under the tape is hard to avoid especially with textured walls and it's just not worth the hassle to fix afterwards.
- Go slowly and steadily. Crisp edges are what give walls the finished look and speeding through the edging is not going to achieve it.
- Use a good quality brush. Cheap brushes give cheap results. My mom and I both swear by Purdy's brushes. This is not a place to to try to save a few bucks.
- When edging, wipe the paint off the side of the brush that will be against the unpainted wall, leaving it only on the painted side. Place the brush into the corner, or against the edge, then slowly slide the brush down the wall. With practice this process will become easier and quicker.
In case that was confusing, I drew a Paint picture. Lucky you.

Isn't that just the clearest explanation you've ever seen? Blogs are always better with drawings. (Shameless plug to the GREATEST BLOG ON THE INTERNET... not mine, unfortunately, but my drawings are clearly just as good, if not better.)

Back to SC's apartment..

Since we had decided the kitchen would be Vintage Americana, we found the perfect shade of red... Sherwin Williams' Antique Red. It just sounds patriotic, doesn't it? Well, on the walls, it looked like "Mid-life Crisis, I'm buying a Porsche, Red" -verbatim from our new apartment-owner. Not exactly what we were going for. Sometimes, even with all the planning in the world, the color just isn't what you'd hoped and you have to start over. We started over with Sherwin Williams' Stolen Kiss. Not quite as patriotic of a name, but more the look we were going for.

We agreed almost immediately that the new color was way better. SC was a little hesitant at first, understandably, cause look at that color, but by the time we were done painting, she loved it as much as I did.

I am loving this so very much. We have plans for wall decor, so some of that red will be covered up and will leave the perfect amount of the perfect shade of America Red. And look how much more open it looks without all the ugly shelving!

AMERICAAAA! (Check out those ceiling heights! SC's a good 5'7".)
This little white cupboard was already in the kitchen, but turned so the back was to the side of the stove, dividing the kitchen from the dining room. SC didn't like that setup as much as this one and I wholeheartedly agree. It opened the place up so much. And when she filled it with her cream and navy dishes, I could've swooned. Just precious. We're debating a lot over what should go on the walls, but we both loved this star. God Bless the USA.

Moving on to the bedroom...

(My roommate helped us paint.) SC decided she wanted her bedroom to have a vintage romantic feel, so we chose this beautiful color, SW's Veiled Violet. It's a gray-purple that comes across more adult-chic than little-girl-princess.

I wish this photo was a video. I've never seen a picture more perfectly capture SC. Roommate and I were TRYING to be productive and SC was having a spin your shirt like a helicopter dance party. Hilarious.

This room is going to be beautiful when it's done. Elegant and mature. (Please disregard the previous photo when trying to envision this...)

And the living room!

I didn't get any in-process pictures of the living room because SC and my roommate painted it before I got there, but it's a great color, SW's Sleepy Blue. I think the word Sleepy is wrong though. It's very refreshing. It brightens the room up and really makes the woodwork pop.

Peeking into the kitchen from the living room, you can see the right amount of Americana Red. The dining room table will go right where SC is standing.

Next weekend we're gonna try to tackle a few small improvement jobs like cleaning up the wood under the window in the kitchen and start moving some furniture in.
Stay tuned for that. :)