steam plant

hometown tourist: the vintage industry

Okay! So. That was an unexpected hiatus. Have I mentioned I was on the board of directors at my kiddo's preschool this year? I volunteered to be the publicity lead, which was great. And also a lot of work. I made some great stuff this year, and I want to share it all with you, but I'm going to take it easy as I make my reentry into blogging.

Having dropped the kiddo off at day camp for a couple of hours, I went on an errand binge. The last place I stopped wasn't on my list, but it's one of those places I always want to stop until I do some mental math and calculate the cost of imaginary damages my offspring might commit.

The Vintage Industry is kind of an antique mall, with separate stalls set up for different vendors. It's just floor to ceiling packed (two floors), and many of the vendors have an amazing ability to style their spaces. A few, not so much, but in every corner there's good stuff to find: mother-of-pearl buttons, embroidered handkerchiefs, library drawers, locker baskets . . . Okay, I'll shut up now and disgorge the cell phone pics (it's true; I'll never learn).

Located on 21st + Main in Springfield, Oregon.

thrift store finds: may 2014

Bring isn't exactly a thrift store, but a reuse store that features mainly building materials. But they do have a large furniture warehouse at the back and a gallery space at the front that sometimes hosts a collection of harder-to-find items or art shows of stuff made with recycled materials. Today's post features things we spied at the store earlier this month while hardware shopping for a project.

Here's a wallpaper cutter from the late 19th century.

 A gigantic Low-Voltage Circuit Tester.

An antique trunk and an accordion my kiddo was pretty set on. (I think he's convinced he could school his music teacher if only he was allowed to touch the accordion.)

Another antique trunk. This one was priced rather high, even during the 50% off furniture sale. I went back on another day and someone had tried to force the lid shut and broke the back off.

An army trunk.

A mid-century drafting table/light table/desk with brass fixtures.

And those are just a few of the cool things we spied. They also had three rows of antique theater seats and a couple of sets of lockers that somehow escaped my camera. I'll stop back in this week and snap some pictures for a future post . . . unless you get there to buy them first!

Thanks for reading.

Linking up to:
The Cottage Market

industrial file cabinet makeover (part one)

Don't avert your eyes; you'll hurt its feelings.

We were in pretty urgent need of a four-drawer filing cabinet for organizing papers and craft supplies, but I had some standards that needed to be met:

1) Must be under 18 inches deep. This was a hard one, as many of the filing cabinets I was scouting out were quite a bit deeper, and I just don't have that kind of space right now.

2) Must be steel. (That wood pattern you see there isn't wood; it's a wood patterned paint on metal drawers. In person, it's really easy to tell the difference.) Steel has the advantage of being lighter than wood (at least, with modern steel construction) and won't let me down by turning out to be made of veneered particle board. Also, modern steel filing cabinets are pretty easy to find at thrift stores; the more modern, the less likely to have lead paint.

3) Must either have a key or have an unlocked top drawer. I passed on a giant antique three-door filing cabinet because the top drawer was locked and I knew it would be a large additional cost to get the lock drilled out. And who knows what was in the top! Could be old papers, could be dead raccoon. Never mind that the cabinet in question met neither of the previous specifications. It was gorgeous blue and had really lovely handles. But the locked cabinet drawer was a deal-breaker for $150.

I spotted this cabinet at St. Vincent de Paul on a day when yellow price tags were 25% off. After discount, I paid $11.24 for it. It met all of the above specifications, with the downside being that it's not a showpiece. I absolutely can't stand the handles.

So, I never intended to leave it as-is. I wanted something more like one of the cabinets I've pinned to my File Cabinets Pinterest board: protected bare metal, nicer hardware, with a style more vintage-industrial than 1980s-office. Sadly, I'm completely priced out of that market. Completely. I'm in more of a $50-filing-cabinet tax bracket.

Okay: so, for the first step, I brought the thing home, removed the drawers, and dug some green paint stripper out of the shed.

I was pretty optimistic after an hour, as the paint on the back was very bubbly and then scraped right off without a tantrum. I'd only used the green paint stripper on wood before (and been frustrated by the lack of results), so I was all excited about how well the rest of the cabinet would go.

You can see the back here, mostly paint-less, and the top, still painty and scabby even after giving the paint stripper another few hours to sit. (I would have let it sit overnight, but for the rain.)

The front and sides fared about the same.

This was a pretty big letdown after how easy the back was. A second run with a different brand of stripper didn't do much but make a mess and waste money.

The palm sander started out not making very good progress, but did better once I'd attached a 35-grit paper and really went at it. It was a lengthy, messy, NOISY undertaking. Sometimes you know a project is done because it's better than you could have imagined. Sometimes you know it's done because no one can listen to even one more minute of the sander vibrating a piece of sheet metal.

After sanding, I buffed it with a coat of automotive wax to protect the finish.

Here is the cabinet as it will stay, with a bit of black left, emphasizing the vintage look (I think it will do nicely).

 
And here is a sneak peek of what's yet to come:

If getting paint off of these cabinets wasn't such a major pita, I'd have a couple of sets of lockers in my carport stripped already. Wanna know something exciting? We've bought a sandblasting kit! I haven't tried it out yet, but I'm really looking forward to seeing how much faster and easier this project is with that tool in hand.

I'll be back soon with part two of this vintage industrial file cabinet makeover, when things really start coming together. Thanks for reading! 

doll cradle + bedding

Donated to the silent auction at the kiddo's school:

 Birds & Branches flannel doll quilt

 

Tufted flannel mattress

 

Pillow and pillowcase

 

Refinished vintage cradle with leather insets

Yay! It sold!

You can see a previous vintage doll cradle project here. I might make this an annual thing. ;)

p.s. want to see some more detail? click a photo to see a larger version.

paper airplane party invitations

Printed on vintage accounting ledger paper.

Airmail graphics for label and stamp are from The Graphics Fairy, and were printed separately on label paper and attached to the airplanes like stamps. ("6 cents" was changed to "4 cents" in Photoshop.)

Postmark is a combination of several glyphs from a font called Dead Letter Office available free from daFont, altered in Photoshop.

Text typeset in Helvetica (all caps, outlined) and Trixie.

I had brainstormed ideas for invitations for my kiddo's Flying Machines party and came up with the idea of a paper airplane invitation that looked like Air Mail. A quick search revealed that it's not a unique idea. Boo hiss. I used this design from Country Living Magazine as a template for my planes, although the result is pretty different.

If you like these but don't want to invest the time to create your own, please e-mail me. I can create a version with your child's name and party details for a reasonable rate, with a 3-day turn-around.

Thanks for reading!