Goodwill Score

I stopped by the Mother of all Goodwills last night on the way home to drop off some recently destashed items from my art room...and what did I do? Bring home NEW items to fill up my recently destashed art room. Sigh.

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But check this out. This was in a small plastic bag of random lace fragments...it's so beautiful. I'm telling myself it's many years old even though of course I have no idea if that's true. But I love it and I think I'm going to add it to a wall vignette I'm planning for the guest bedroom at home. I'll post photos when I (eventually) do it.

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Here's a closeup...I can't even IMAGINE trying to make something that fine...

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A different sort of 'paint by number'

Here is an embroidery piece from a kit I bought several years ago (ahem) that I finally finished. It was the perfect project for those times when I wanted my hands to be busy but I wasn't feeling all that creative, or I just didn't want to make a big mess in my art room (or more likely I already HAD a big mess and didn't want to clean it up so I could work on something else).

I haven't decided what I'm going to do with it. Well, ironing it would be the first step, I suppose. I suspect I'll piece together some cool fabric for a background and think of a fun way to display it...maybe hanging from a small branch.

And this is from a table runner I found at the Goodwill Outlet store in Seattle. There are literally huge piles of fabric-y things (clothes, linens, pillows) to sort through, but at pennies per serving (they charge by the pound of merchandise), it's worth it. I always take everything home and immediately toss it into the washing machine. Then I have fun cutting it up (if it's clothing) and adding it to my (ever growing) stash of fabric fun-ness.

Ta-Dum...The Great Basement Remodel of 2009

I cannot even BEGIN to tell you what a relief it was to get rid of the vile carpeting and boring white walls with thousands of nail holes in my daylight basement. It took about a month of hard work, many trips to Home Depot, and my entire renovation budget for the year. But here are the results...which I am absolutely thrilled with! The hallway is a soft, mossy green and the stairwell and bathroom are both robin's egg blue.

Rather than replace the transparent but otherwise perfectly good window in the bathroom, I made a trip to the local home salvage warehouse, bought a bunch of chipped glass blocks in all sorts of sizes and patterns and created a little vignette to give me privacy and a focal point for the wall. The bathroom is actually the same blue as the stairwell, but you'd never know it by MY camera settings...

I refer to this as my "Shabby Chic" wall. I created a faux linen look using golden glaze and a stiff wallpaper brush, making horizontal and then vertical stripes. I took the glass out of this rescued window and hung old pearl necklaces, pages from botanical books, skeleton keys and a wreath I made out of odd little fake roses. I used a very old pale peach lace scarf as a backdrop.

The 5 boxes came from a little chest of drawers I picked up at the Mother of all Goodwills (MOAG) near downtown Seattle. Some child had scribbled all over the front with crayons, so I turned them around, screwed them together and created this fun little storage/wall display thingie. The starfish on the front are actually big push-pins so I just pressed them right into the backs (which are now the fronts) of the drawers. All of the treasures inside are found objects. The framed prints are actually more pages from a botanical book placed inside matching white wooden frames I also found at the MOAG.