An amazing instant collection

It has been nearly 110 degrees here for days on end. Because our *second* car is a 22 year old pick up truck with no a/c, Dave has been taking my van every day to work. By this morning I needed OUT OF HERE, hot as hell or not.

I still have a smallish list of things I need for the new baby. (Hello? Wipe warmer? Come to mama!) So garage sales here I come.

I didn't buy a single thing for the new baby.

But I bought a box of vintage doll clothes. (And it was a painful purchase. Cue flaky woman who has no idea how much money she wants and wants to pick out every single piece in the heat and insists they WERE sorted and blah blah. I just want to buy the box and get back in the car.)

The clothes are cute. And they alone were worth the $4.

A pretty floral robe.
A satiny bed jacket...
with bunnies!
A pretty party dress.
And an ever so sweet little organizer? mystery object.

There is a nice sized pile of stuff actually.

But the real treasure is something I didn't even know was in that box.

An amazing collection of the sweetest little doll shoes!
I think they are painted canvas.
With faded pink ribbons.
Not a pair, but they were the only two left, so she must have been using them together.
And art deco buckles.
Pure perfection.

I am in LOVE.

I need to figure out what I can gently stuff in them to reshape them a little bit without detracting from the shoes themselves so I can put them all in a shadowbox.

What a nice suprise.

Afterward we went looking for a car.

And we found a good candidate. Crossing fingers this works out well on Monday. We really need a second car. (That we can all fit in.)

Particularly since we are only about 10-12 weeks away from the arrival of TBA!

Paper doll art

These are not magazine worthy photos, I was trying to avoid shadows of me and the chandelier, but trust me on this, these are crazy, crazy cute. And easy to do. (And this is a really small room, barely 10 x 11.)

I just put scrapbook paper behind them. (I used an old Martha pack called pegboard, which is polka dots).
The 12 x 12 paper is not quite big enough for the frame with the girls, so I have pieced it until I figure out a better solution.

Then I just matched dots to the clothes. Brown dots here.

And so on.

The bottom dress here has slipped a little bit. I didn't want to tape them in, because I didn't want them ruined.

Pesky chandelier!

Sammi moves to a new room

(Blogger seems to have uploaded these in whatever order they wanted, and there are too many for me to rearrange, sorry about that. And they have no spell check.)

I worked my tail off and got Sammi into her new room in just a few days.

And I LOVE it. It is so sweet and fresh and vintage little girl.

I have been browsing nursery websites looking for ideas for TBA's room* and some of the ones that claim to be "budget" make me die. $2000 is a budget nursery? WHOA. So just for fun I will include the prices of what I can remember. I have been collecting things for awhile now, so some are forgotten.
View from the door.
Next to the crib.
Basket with some of her doll quilts. I have the rest in the cupboard so I can switch them out. I know some people assumed that if TBA is a girl I would've just left them, but those are gifts of love to Sam from so many of you! They belong to her. (Basket $5 walmart.)
Old towel rack ($2) behind the door holding the perfect baby quilt ($8).
Vintage toddler dress ($3) on the closet doors.
Marquee letters ($20 for 36 of them) above the closet.
Other view from the door.
American girl bitty baby (50 cents) in a vintage doll bed ($5) with a feedsack quilt (50 cents).
End table ($15) with vintage baby sized quilts and an old tole lamp ($3).
Quilt kitty and assorted stuff on thrift store shelves ($2).
Inside her cupboard.
My favorite cupboard ($30) with her tin doll house ($10) on top.
Wood doll kitchen ($2), which she loves.
Vintage doll bunk beds (maybe $10?) with a vintage coat rack (pay by the pound, so maybe 30 cents). I hang her little necklaces and stuff here and she LOVES to accessorize!
Poofs and bunting and vintage prints ($5) above her bed.
This was a FILTHY old telephone shelf ($2) which is working perfectly for diapers.
A new used crib ($25). Jenny lind beds are becoming crazy hard to find around here. The hardest part of the crib was painting it. It takes at least 6 cans of spray paint, in case you want to do that yourself. ($25). I did not sand it or anything crazy like that. (Linens are from goodwill, shabby chic baby from target, $4 for all of it.)
My FAVORITE FAVORITE part! Paper doll art. I have pictures of all of them for tomorrow. ($10 for the paper dolls, $5 for all the frames, 2 cans of paint - $6.)
Old wool coat on the door ($2).
Pretty, perfectly shabby mirror above the dresser ($6).
Pretty old shelf holding diaper supplies. (Which are not so pretty, but I didn't have any more canisters I liked in there.)Dresser with floral appliques on it ($40), which required a million coats of paint.

Sweet isn't it?

And even if I added up EVERY little thing in there, including crib mattresses and changing pads and trash cans and so forth I am well below the $500 mark.

*I am thinking vintage alphabet for TBA. But it's proving to be a bit more challenging than I wanted. So I might give up. LOL

Quilts and kids

How about some Sammi? I feel like I haven't put her on the blog in forever.
Right now she is in the "book phase", aka read me this book at least 4,000 times mama. And if you won't keep reading I am going to throw this book at you and roll on the floor shrieking. She LOVES cats, so she digs through the books searching for pictures of cats. As soon as a cat is spotted I have to start reading. I am pretty sure she thinks the monkeys in Hand, hand, fingers, thumb are cats because that is THE MOST LOVED book right now.
She also loves to look out the windows at our lawn mower man.I decided it was time to start working on those fine motor skills and brought out a puzzle. She knows which hole it goes in, but only actually gets the piece in about 1 in 40 tries.
And she is a goofball. (I have a similiar photo of Jack at this age. Love.)
Wednesdays are garage sale days here. Since it is going to be at least 10,000 degrees for the next 10 days I hit one garage sale this morning. And I bought another cutter quilt. Even though I just sold 10 of them. Ooof.
The prints are sweet.
This is a favorite block.
The rest of this block is shredded but the novelty print is awesome.

Sammi's new room is done. I am convinced I will get photos of it taken any minute now.

Ahem.