This one took forever

I've been looking for a gurley candle forever. It's hard to believe that with all the holiday stuff I have that I have not managed to find a single one.

After years and years of looking at every cheesy holiday candle known to man, I finally have one.
And a cute one at that.

This is the only way I knew it was a gurley though.

It will probably take me another 10 years to find the second one!

I had to have it

Another doll quilt.

From Ebay this time.

And kind of outrageously expensive. (Let's just say that on a good day I could buy 2 full sized quilts for that price around here.)

But I had to have it.

A few of my favorite things

We are currently finishing part of the basement so we can use it as a playroom. When Miss Thing arrives she is going to be taking up residence in what we are using as a playroom, so the toys are outta there.

And, I miss the finished basement at the other house. A lot. It was nice to be able to send Jack downstairs to have all his noisy, crazy, running around, wild time when it was too hot or too cold or too rainy to go out in the yard.

Did I mention the necessity of a place to sit while waiting out tornadoes?

Yea, we need the basement. So, as part of that remodel I have been selling a lot of stuff we have down there. Stuff we haven't touched since we moved.
This HUGE Christmas tree was among the things to go. My Dad gave it to me a few years ago, and it is a gorgeous, fluffy, former display at Victoria's Secret tree. (Obviously it isn't "fluffed" in the photo.) But it's 10 feet tall.

I kept it when we were in the rental house hoping that our forever house would have a tall enough ceiling. Can't you just see it dripping with my vintage ornaments?
Ornaments like these, which are HUGE...
and ornaments like these, which while not huge are pretty awesome too.

Goodness knows I have enough ornaments to fill a tree like that. (And yet, I love nothing more than finding new ones like these to add to the boxes.)

It would have been lovely.

But this is our forever house and we have standard ceilings. So it has flown off to a home built in 1812 that is part of one of those Christmas walks where I am sure it will be enjoyed by many.

The ornaments however? They stay with me forever!

Just fun

I have to say there is not a whole lot of Halloween stuff this year that makes me drool. I have tried every store imaginable and only 3 new things have come home with me.

I did manage to find these window clings at Dollar Tree and thought they were super cute.

Is everyone watching The Nate Show yet? I think I am in love! (And I never thought he was all that before this show started.) It certainly fills the void that Martha used to fill in morning television. (Her show is a total snoooooooooooze fest for me now. WAY WAY too much cooking and too much gardening and too much, I don't know, boring stuff. Ha.)

The first gift

Last week a beautiful little package arrived on the porch from April . This sweet little doll quilt was among the other things inside of it.

Miss Thing's very first gift.

I cried when I saw it.

Those of you who have been hanging around here with us for awhile know that we have a long (and ridiculous) saga with our families. I don't spend much time thinking about it (I am happy that we have a quiet life without the drama, my own childhood was so tumultuous and I don't want that for my kids), but once in awhile it strikes me that aside from my very small family and our friends we will be celebrating the arrival of Miss Thing with a very limited group of people.

Knowing that so many of you have shared in the journey to get her here, and that you are both celebrating and rooting for her, brings me much joy.

I want her to know that part of her story includes all of you. That there is something to be said for coming together as women, to share our journeys to motherhood (and through motherhood), that helps to create the ties the bind.

That sharing, that giving, has helped make this part (which has ultimately been the hardest thing I have done thus far) a journey of hope and ultimately one of faith, instead of one of grief and despair.

Her first gift is so much more than a package in the mail. It's a lasting gift. A hand extended across the miles. And so much more.

Thank you.

The worry.

I had planned to post plenty of other things, but Jack is really quite ill. He has had some sinus problems for nearly 20 days now. I took him to the ped at 9 days out and he started taking Omnicef for a sinus infection. Last Friday he developed a bad ear infection. We saw the ped again. Then yesterday he started getting a very itchy rash all over his body.

By this morning he has done nothing but cry for 2 days.

He is now having a severe reaction to the Omnicef which has left him with really bad hives all over his body and excruciating joint pain (which means he cannot walk).

Oh yea, and now he has double ear infections and still has the sinus problem.

We've been to the ped for the third time in 10 days, he is now taking a ridiculous amount of medicines and me? FREAKING OUT.

So. I will be back when I can get a grip.

Vintage Valentine Score

Okay then. Last week was bad. A whole week without David, Jack was sick, I had to throw up A LOT*, and everything was piling up around me.

Dave is home again. Jack has an ear infection now, which means another 10 days of antibiotics (20 days total now), and now MY ear hurts. WHY CAN'T THEY WASH THEIR HANDS AT SCHOOL?

That's a tangent for another day I suppose.

I finally have most of the Halloween stuff up, the laundry is caught up, dinner is in the crock pot and I have tried my best to take an entire week's worth of blog photos at once. They may not be thrilling, but, hey, in my world right now it's something! :-)

I bought 2 bags stuffed full of Valentines at the flea a few weeks ago. I think there are 75 + valentines in those bags, but here's a little taste of how sweet they are:







Totally awesome right?

It makes me excited for the next heart to heart swap. You know, the one when Miss Thing will be all of like a month old? LOLOLOL

Back tomorrow with Miss Thing's very first gift. It's a sweet one!

*I actually cried in the carpool line because I had to throw up so bad. I don't know what came over me. I had to throw up, the line was taking forever, I didn't want to throw up in the grass, yadda yadda. I say all of this while laughing now but it was so not funny then.

A quick note

Dave is out of town for work all week, so I am extra crazed this week, but I just read that Bloglines will be shut down as of October 1.

If you are still reading Makin' Projiks on that feedreader you will need to move your feed to Google Reader (the only feed reader left I think?).

Just find their instructions for exporting your feeds. It's pretty easy (says she who cannot work a simple cell phone).

Be back soon with real news. You know, the kind where I am forced to go postal on Urban Outfitters for STILL NOT finding me that all important feedsack rug. Sigh.

Mini Quilt number one

Since I have found myself unwilling to pay the prices that vintage doll quilts fetch on Ebay and am still not having much luck finding them locally, I decided to use some of the random quilt blocks I have in a box in the sewing room and make mini quilts for Miss Thing's room from them.
I started with blocks that looked like this. Baskets of some sort, maybe?
Trimmed them up, put four of them together, et voila! a 14 x 14 doll quilt. (After quilting and binding of course.)
Some of the fabrics are super sweet. (Never mind that fuzz ball that snuck in there!)

The little bunnies on the blue kill me with cuteness.

One quilt down, many to go.

Now I have 4 big bins of Halloween stuff waiting for me before I finish the next one. (A yo-yo quilt this time. The yo-yo's are done already, thanks to boring television.)

Linens, linens, linens

It seems like linens are all I can manage to find when junking right now. I want Halloween or Christmas! :-)

Oh well, I will take what I can get.
This doesn't look like much from far away...
but it is the sweetest handmade bedspread in the perfect shade of lavender.
I bought this because I am hoping this fabric will work as a crib skirt, but what on earth is it?
It is big enough to be a duvet cover, but that hole in the middle certainly is strange.
This chenille spread is the first thing I bought on the 61 mile yard sale on Friday. It screamed out that it wanted to be a rocking chair slipcover.
And as luck would have it, I did find a rocking chair on the 61 sale. This is now destined for the scissors, as that chair needs new cushions. (It looks pretty good in the photo, but there is a big hole and chenille loss and a rust stain too.)
This also came from the 61 sale.

Totally useless, and I already have one other baby chenille spread, but it was 50 cents or something crazy. So home it came.

Now back to those mini quilts and Halloween projects and basement remodels with me.

Spray paint a feather tree

Things have been busy, busy over here. Dave and I went on our annual 61 mile yard sale on Friday. We bought a lot of stuff, but mostly stuff for Miss Thing or Jack. (When I saw the price of stuff in the baby store I really did freak out, and then I got serious about buying everything possible/reasonable second hand. I am making good progress on my list, and for very little money. Well, until I went and bought that rug and that chandelier and umm, curtains too, from Urban Outfitters.)

All of this preparation for Miss Thing includes remodeling (finishing really) part of our basement to make it into one giant playroom/family room. The current playroom will be housing the new baby and as we are acquiring lots of baby things I need a place to put them! (Which has also meant selling a lot of unneeded stuff on Craigslist. We have never unpacked the stuff in the basement and there is so.much.stuff down there we really do not need.)

So, while Dave has been working very hard down there and I was selling things I realized I still had like 4 unused white feather trees down there. You know the tree, you see it often:
white and shabby with pretty little roses.
Several years ago I bought 10 or 12 of those trees when I found them insanely cheap at a discount place. (Think pocket change cheap.) At first I thought I would sell them on Ebay, they are pretty easy to ship, but blah, too much work. I have gifted them, traded them, and tried to no avail to sell them via Craigslist. ($15 for a real feather tree? COME ON PEOPLE! It's cheap!)

With all things Halloween on the brain, I had a moment of brilliance today.
Spray paint one of the trees!

Voila, the black feather tree for Halloween that I have dreamed of buying for many, many years but have never been able to fork over the money for. (Goodness, my pink feather tree was so bloody expensive.)

And it worked very well.

One tree out of the basement + 30 minutes snipping off roses + one can of $3 spray paint (already in the garage from another Halloween project I am working on) + 20 minutes of time = the start of the Halloween madness.

(edited because the trees were all spoken for rather quickly.)

Fickle

It's a gray Thursday morning and I am sitting here tossing around baby room ideas.
I bought this sleeping bag at the fabric yard sale a few weeks ago. I can't decide whether to take it apart for the super cute fabric or leave it be.
It sure seems like this fabric could be put to better use. A crib skirt perhaps? Basket liners?
I bought this pottery barn kids bumper off Craigslist on a whim. It was NOT on my list (because really, a bumper is not a useful, needed item and is controversial at best). But that patchwork on it called to me. The colors are fairly bright and funky (that is not my photo, btw).

And then when I was browsing Urban Outfitters this morning I had a little flash of inspiration. I could leave that room painted white and add:
this super fun feedsack printed rug and

this funky chandelier.

Combine that with a wall of mini quilts, and I think I could have a full on patchwork theme.

It's not at all the direction I thought I would go in. But I think that since the rest of our house is pretty frilly/fluffy/pink/girly I want something different.

What do you think?

Sweet baby things

My girlfriend and I went to the flea bright and early on Sunday morning. Frankly the flea is not so great this year. It's a struggle to find anything to buy!

We were on our way back to the vans when I happened to spot a box crammed full of fabric. I had a rummage through it and realized it was old* baby clothes. I already have a small collection of these (you've seen some of them in the laundry room on the clothesline), and she wanted $10 for the box. I decided to risk it, even though they were really, really, dirty and stained and perhaps ruined.

I should have taken a before photo, but with fall quickly closing in, I was rushing to take advantage of the bright hot sun that day to do some bleaching.
There are 20 pieces worth keeping. Several of these dresses...
with precious details. (This dress is actually green, but the blue of the door overwhelms it.)
This christening gown is part of the reason I decided to take a chance on the box.
It was one of the things on my list to find.
But *this* is what really sold me. I LOVE that little lamb.
And then I got home and found this bunny. SQUEAL.

And the duckies! Oh man, too much cuteness.

And what amazing care and time they used to take making tiny baby things. Quite a difference from the stuff we buy today.

Several of these are destined for frames in Miss Thing's nursery.

Maybe the flea wasn't so bad after all this week. :-)

*Most of these are tagged handmade in the Phillipines. I have two similiar dresses that were my mom's, so I am fairly sure they date to the 1950's.