rusty robot "vintage" door sign diy

This post was my recent project audition for "So You Think You're Crafty" and guess what? I was lucky enough to make it into the regular competition phase. To all of the amazing competitors I was up against, well done. I hope I'm up to the challenge of meeting the bar you've all raised. The weekly competition is anonymous and starts in January; I'll let you know when the voting starts for the first round!

I don’t know about you, but I have pin boards full of so many projects over on Pinterest that I’m sure I’ll never get to all of them in this lifetime. I’m gonna have to start farming stuff out. You busy? ;)

One recent love that I’ve been pinning (over and over and over again) is vintage signage. I love old typography, vintage graphics, and weathered finishes. When my love of vintage signs recently dovetailed with my need for a fireplace fix-up, I ended up picking up a pair of vintage army green sheet metal panels from Bring (the local re-building store) for 50 cents each . . . and then, because I tend to eyeball things rather than measuring them, I had a whole panel leftover.

I decided to make my sweet kiddo a sign to go above the door of his room with the leftover panel. Since he’s two and a complete nut for robots,  his room is now labeled a “ROBOTICS LAB". He loves it! In fact, the rest of the afternoon he was sing-songing "robotics lab" over and over again and dancing by the door of his room. Win!

I hope you like my kiddo's rusty robot sign as much as we do! I'll consider it high praise if you sing about it later.

I have a second, similar project I'll be posting soon. In that post, I'll go into more detail about each of the steps, but I hope this photo collage tutorial will help you get started if you're someone who just needs a little push in the right direction. Basically, start with a surface that's a little gritty and old,  paint, then roughen it up and help it rust!

that's how i roll: a skinny shelf for the bath / laundry room

I've mentioned before, I think, that we live in a little mid-century-era ranch-style house that measures under 1000 square feet. With a toddler. And some cats. Space gets a little tight sometimes, and creative storage ideas are always in high demand. So when, a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about the problem area that is our shared bathroom / laundry room, I did some storage brainstorming.

There's not much room in there, but there is a space about a foot wide next to the stacked washer and dryer where I'd been stashing extra boxes of detergent, catfood, bleach, and a wastebasket. These had to be moved whenever I needed to get the broom or mop out. Not very convenient.

I thought about building a narrow shelf for the space, but a trip to Bring for some useable lumber instead turned up this: a narrow shelf (probably part of a desk) with sliding drawers on either side. (Cat not included.)

I picked up this pile of old casters there, too. Knowing they wouldn't be visible, I didn't mind the rust; they were a buck each, and the shelf was $10 or $15 I think . . . less than I would have spent on lumber and drawer hardware, anyway, and since I don't have professional carpentry skills, anything I would have built wouldn't have looked as finished.

What I can do is attach casters with a hodge-podge of leftover wood screws. That's how I roll.

Honestly, the hardest part of this project was finding four matching casters in the pile. After all four casters were attached, I just stood the shelf on its end, and rolled it into the space.

It's a bit hard to photograph in the cramped quarters of my bathroom, but I took some shots head-on and from the hallway to give you a bit of an idea.

There's a storage bin on top, and the wood rectangle is the front of a nice, deep drawer for storing dryer sheets, bleach, extra soap, etc.).

The shelf is deep enough and tall enough that I was able to stack three boxes of detergent powder in the back, with the cat food and in-use detergent containers in front. The mop and broom still fit behind everything else, but the casters make it easy to roll everything out of the way first.

Right now, because the shelf is technically on its side, the drawers open on their sides, too . . . but I'm pretty much okay with that. What I would like to do soon though, is to add some drawer hardware to make it prettier. As soon as I find the right ones I'll take a little photo for you.

What have you been organizing or simplifying lately? I love visiting your (non-spam) links in my comments section, so feel free to tell me where to visit!

Thanks for reading.


p.s. you can make these photos larger just by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that.

fun dinettes at the re - building store

If I was in the market for a dining solution, one of these hip yellow mid-century foldable diner dinettes would have fit the bill.

Double so because of the price tag. Seating for four for $75? This would be so awesome in a small eat-in kitchen like mine.

They had several of these out at Bring this week; not sure how many are left, but I snapped these photos earlier today, so maybe if you were to call them up first thing in the morning . . .

Me, I have a too-large dining room table filling up my space. Today I was pining for one of these. What's in your dining room?


(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)

in the tiki tiki tiki tiki tiki room

It was a few months back that I found these two Paul Marshall tiki mugs at the thrift store, cute little things. No cracks, no crazing, all markings are clear and readable. The faux bois texture is awesome.

From everything I've been able to figure out in my research, it's difficult to put an exact date of production on tiki collectibles; I'm estimating that these two mugs (based on others I've scouted out on-line) are from the 1970s. These two mugs are quite similar to one another, though the one on the right is very slightly shorter, with very slightly darker glaze.








From the Ooga Mooga website description:
"This is the classic Paul Marshall Products 'peanut' mug design, in tiki mug form. Beige unglazed ceramic, with brown glazed top and bottom. Tiki has a mouth shaped like a sideways peanut, eyes like almonds, with pupils, gently recessed eyebrows, hands on belly. Marked 'PMP©' on base."

Peanut mugs. I love it.




Listed for sale in my Etsy vintage shop; stop by to accessorize your very own tiki room!


(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)

leftovers

Whenever I finish a project, there are usually leftovers of one kind or another. In the past, I have just boxed things up and stashed them away, but the recent clean-out of the spare room may just have cured me from that habit. New habit I'm trying to form: using the leftovers to make another fun project right away.

Saving things for later seems like the right thing to do, but when you have as many different kinds of hobbies as I have, and when you tend to forget down the road where the leftovers are or whether you have them at all, you end up buying new stuff each time anyway. Wasteful. Makes storage areas messy, too, and then when you're pulling stuff out to donate, you start adding up in your head the money you spent . . .

The Halloween costume project this year meant leftovers of several kinds: felt and fake fur, most obviously. With Christmas coming up, I thought I'd take some of the stuff and make something cute with it for my kiddo.




Voila! Monster pillows!

To start, I cut the largest rectangle I could from the leftovers of a remnant of faux fur used for the tail of my son's Halloween costume. The pillow pictured is made with a piece that measured about 13 x 25 inches. (Folded in half and stitched, it made a nearly-square pillow approximately 12 x 12 inches.)

Next, I planned the face, and cut face parts out of leftover red, orange, ivory, and charcoal gray felt. I stitched the layers together, then planned where they should go on the pillow (not too close to the edges, and not to close to where the fold would go at the top of the pillow). You can pin your pieces in place; I just free-handed, because I wasn't too picky about having the face end up perfectly placed. I think it looks a little sillier slightly off-kilter.

Using my machine, I stitched around the face pieces close to the edges, attaching them to the fur.

Then, I clipped my threads, made my fold so that the furry sides were together, and stitched around all of the open edges, leaving a space open to turn the pillow right-side out and stuff it. I stuffed it full of fluff, then hand-stitched the opening closed.




I may have a hard time keeping this guy (and his soon-to-be siblings!) out of sight until Christmas. He already looks quite at home in the nursery chair.




(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)


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progress

Promised: shots of this room in progress. I'm not always awesome about updating the blog on a project from start to finish (there are still, for example, a few dozen Alice in Wonderland shots from last summer that I keep meaning to post), but I'm really excited: a) to have the back room useable (the kiddo loves to wrestle pillows on the bed, and bounce, and read Heedley Pecked Me in the Eye for the umpteenth time); b) to have completed such an insurmountable task as cleaning the space out; c) to be able to have visiting friends and family stay with us when they visit, as opposed to a hotel, a campground, or someone else's house. Have I mentioned how grown up that makes me feel at age thirty+? Really, really, really.

Here is the earlier "in progress" shot from a few weeks ago. The headboard is a cut-down old door from Bring. The bedframe came from Craigslist. No, we did not get robbed at gunpoint.




And here is a current "in-progress" shot. The room isn't done yet (is any room in our house ever done?), but you can see, we'd now be comfortable hosting guests here.



The sheets, dust ruffle, and white curtain panels are recent Target clearance. The name-embroidered pillow is a re-worked wedding present with fabric from Ikea and Troismiettes. The coffee sack bolster is made from the remains of the coffee sack I recently blogged about here. The small rectangular pillow is a Target clearance item from four or five years ago, unearthed in The Great Clearing, with added vintage button details. The grey tweed wool on the square pillow came from the Assistance League of Eugene thrift store shortly after I moved up this way. The finger paintings are the work of my favorite baby boy, hung with vintage wooden pant hangers.


This next photo shows a close-up of some really cute little tiki shot glasses from Archie McPhee, repurposed as tiny planters for some hens-and-chicks and baby tears (don't succulents have the best names?). You can see these in the previous photo as well, on the headboard.




Shown here is the night stand vignette, also still in progress.



The night stand is the first piece of furniture my father's parents bought together after their wedding: a sewing machine table. Inside the hinged front panel is where Grandpa, an electrical engineer, attached the foot pedal to the wall of the cabinet so that Grandma could use her knee instead of her foot to operate the machine. This was probably VERY helpful with little kids around; I've discovered how much my kiddo likes to go after the pedal of my own sewing machine when it's sitting on the floor. Being able to keep it away from little hands while in use as well as when put away is pure genius.

The little spatterware pot is something I picked up at the Olde English Flea Market last weekend. Great for holding the watches and earrings of house guests. The book is the aforementioned Heedley, which is well-loved around here. The lamp is a piece of red cedar we kept from our old rental house when we left. The mister cut both ends flat and sanded off all potentially splintery or pokey parts, and I attached a lamp kit.


The search for the perfect shade has turned up this St. Vinnie's drum shade ($2.50). It's not quite right yet, but I'm still considering how to change it into something fabulous.




The window wall. The clock was on the wall for thirty+ years at the BookMark, the first bookstore to ever employ me. There used to be a large sign over it that read, helpfully, "CLOCK". I still have the sign somewhere, too. The barn star only looks old; it came from the craft store. The tin "Days o' Work" art is actually an antique chewing tobacco mold that came from the Salvation Army's local antique/vintage store, Tea & Crumpets. It's a regular old Salvation Army store now, but for awhile it held a pretty awesome collection of 1920s-1930s inlaid British wardrobes, old photographs, and glassware.




Our Ikea chair folds out into The World's Most Comfortable Cot. People have been sleeping on this in our living room or {former} office for years. Now it makes this room perfect for guests with kids. The corduroy pillow is a Fred Meyer clearance pillow (from six or eight years ago) that I tufted with some buttons. The coffee sack pillow is blogged here. The pillow covers on the seat of the chair were purchased with the bedspread (see bed photo) at Value Village. More about that in a minute.




One of my favorite collections, rediscovered in this room a couple of months ago, is my collection of vintage rackets and paddles. You can find these inexpensively at almost any thrift store, but one of these is my hubby's high school racket. Can you spot it? It's the one peeking up in the bottom left corner.




This is the first racket I ever bought, back in high school. The Salvation Army used to run a salvage store in my home town. Maybe they still do! You could buy clothing there by the pound, and I did. I think I paid a buck for the racket, too. Everything was way underpriced, even by thrift store standards. I later used the racket in a college tennis class, and the PE teacher thought it was awesome. Still strung tightly, with lots of bounce. The Scrabble letter sign (from a vintage 1970s set found at Value Village) takes on a double meaning when displayed with the rackets.




There are a million little details I'm still working on, and I'm saving the closet makeover for another post, but this should give you an idea how things are progressing. It's been so much fun arranging little treasures in here, and we've spent more time in this room in the past couple of months that we have in the past five years. It's been like increasing the size of our house by 10%, and we love it.




One last note, and a nicely lit bed view: The bedspread you see here came from Value Village, together with the two pillow covers you saw on the chair seat. They were a deep charcoal gray when I bought them. Too dark, I thought, for the room, but I liked the texture, and the size and price were right. So, despite knowing better from years of textile and surface design classes in college, I decided to try and fade the color with bleach.

Bleach doesn't just fade black. In fact, if you soak most black textiles in bleach, you'll get some variation of yellow, brown, or orange, not white. I ended up with a bedspread that was Beaver State orange. Over-dyeing with Black Velvet and Jeans Blue Dylon dye turned it chocolate brown. Not at all what I'd intended, but it'll do for now. Sometimes dye accidents aren't the end of the world. In this case, it goes nicely with the reproduction Swiss army blankets from Mills Fleet Farm.



There you go! Consider yourselves updated!