Hello! I recently showed off some vacation ICAD (index-card-a-day) designs, but hadn't gotten around to showing off some of the other index cards I'd decorated in July. Today's post will rectify that.
Blend of old and new: vintage detergent ad and words cut from a current Lands End catalog.
Another blend of old and new:
Catalog image and a bit of doodling along with an altered 1880's ledger page.
Made in honor of our daughter's birthday, this index card design features rubber stamping, art paper scrap, vintage matchbook scrap, painted vintage bingo card, altered menu cut into gift shape, and the word "present" cut from a flashcard.
Lots of rubber stamping, a bit of red and white twine, and a round playing card.
When I was feeling lazy, I'd doodle instead of making something more complicated. Kind of fun to do, actually.
A flower shape was cut from a vintage book of floor plans, then oil pastel colors were added.
A collage made up of scraps from a bin of white papers. Included were pieces from paper company samples, leftover office folders, and rubber stamping projects.
Not shown, but also created during the July ICAD challenge was a "don't forget" list for a big family party on the 4th of July, more doodling, a receipt from a now-closed grocery store in East Lansing, MI (idiot developer), lettering experiments, waxed thread stitchery, the testing out of new-to-me rubber stamps, homages to tea and to Indiana cantaloupes (the best around, currently available at our farmers' market) and more.
So, overall, how did the ICAD challenge go? I admit, there were times it seemed a bit tedious, usually when I didn't remember to do one until the end of the day when I was already tired. It was also a bit tedious to create the vacation ICAD cards on the spot, what with the cutting up and arranging of various images and print.
I'll also admit to forgetting to do a card twice. Both times I made the card the next day instead. I suppose I could have not bothered with making up those two days, but I wanted a complete set, and that's what I have.
Once the challenge was over, I was a bit relieved - no more wracking my brains to come up with something each day! (I never bothered with the daily prompts the ICAD Challenge creator supplied) But within a day or two I actually missed the act of decorating index cards. Although I especially enjoyed the collage work, I discovered I liked doodling with my marker sets as well, and the index cards came in handy for testing out the secondhand craft paints and rubber stamps I bought in June and July.
Glad I did the ICAD Challenge!
Hello! Returned from a week's vacation and here are some photos from our trip.
The National Memorial Arch, Valley Forge National Historical Park. "...dedicated in 1917 to commemorate the 'patience and fidelity' of the soldiers who wintered at Valley Forge in 1777-78."
I'm sure that plenty of people come to Valley Forge during business hours to learn some history, but if you go after hours, as we did, you'll see scores of parents romping with their kids on vast open fields, plus horseback riders, runners, cyclists and walkers like us. With a network of multi-use paths and a hilly terrain, it's an excellent place for exercise and outdoor play.
A short while after this picture was taken, we saw a group of serious young men with serious photography equipment (tripods, large cameras) set up in a row near the arch. They were getting instruction from an older man, probably on tips for sunset photos. But since they were speaking in a foreign language, I didn't really know what was being said. I hope they got some good shots - they had a nice evening and a great location.
The next several photos are from the Enchanted Woods (children's garden section) at Winterthur, near Wilmington, DE. I found it to be very charming, hence the several pictures I took.
Child-sized seating - all you need is your teddy bear, some lemonade and some cookies!
Giant toadstool "house".
And a giant-sized "nest" with three "eggs" inside it.
Words embedded in stones.
Squirrel carved into a picnic table inside a play house.
Along one wall of the play house. These chairs are on a raised platform, so I wondered if kids pretended they were kings or queens sitting on their thrones.
Unfortunately for us, the Enchanted Woods wasn't put in until after we moved away from the region. Our daughter turned three shortly before we moved, so we would have taken her to this section of the Winterthur gardens had it been there then. The children we saw the day of our visit looked to be having a great time there!
A few more pictures from Winterthur's gardens, all taken in the Reflecting Pool area:
Reflecting pool.
Statue at one end of the Reflecting Pool.
Just beyond the Reflecting Pool was this sweet statue. The plaque near it mentioned that the statue was dedicated to one of the Du Pont women (the Du Ponts were the original owners of Winterthur) and said she was noted for her "silvery laugh". Not sure what a silvery laugh is, but it sounds like a nice thing to be remembered for.
Moving on and north of the Delaware Valley region, we used Williamsport, PA as our home base for exploring local and not-so-local places of interest.
View outside a window in our hotel. Westerners would likely sneer at those mountains, since most are no taller than 2,000 ft, but that's still plenty tall for us!
No shortage of funky signage in Ithaca, NY:
We lunched at Ithaca Bakery.
The next set of signs were on a message board inside a mini-mall building.
Just don't see this variety of businesses where we live, so I enjoy seeing such message boards in hip college towns!
I liked the above sign for "Bodacious Cheeseballs", with several varieties of such offered for sale. I never would have thought of starting a cheeseball business, but someone in Ithaca had! I wondered how well their business was doing.
Back to the Williamsport area again:
No visit to the area would be complete without a stop at Purity Chocolates near Allenwood, PA. If you go during the week you'll likely see some candy making in action; large windows at one end of the retail store offer views of the small factory behind the store. Above, pretzel rods are being enrobed in chocolate. You can see the bare pretzels awaiting their coating on the right side of the photo, and on the left the pretzels are finished with their "bath" of dark chocolate. Not shown but to the right of the uncoated pretzels was the employee whose job it was to arrange those pretzels in orderly rows on the conveyor belt.
Purity always has some gigantic chocolate pieces ready for a special purchase. When we've come in the fall it's huge solid turkeys, but this time we saw:
Above, a 3 1/2 pound milk chocolate football, surrounded by small foil-wrapped chocolate footballs. It retails for $39.95. Just the thing to reward your son if he scores the winning touchdown in that big game! There was also a similarly-sized/packaged basketball.
Enjoyed a 5 1/2 mile walk along the Pine Creek Rail Trail after visiting Purity.
Typical scenery along the trail.
Lots of wildflowers, as shown above. The lower photo of the two shows thimbleberries, but they weren't quite ready to pick.
After we were done with our walk it was time to start heading west back toward home. We went as far as Dubois, PA that day. Thanks to Yelp, I'd learned of Luigi's, an Italian restaurant in downtown Dubois, so that's where we ate dinner. I can recommend the stromboli option; it sure was good. It helped that one could pick up to three choices for the filling, similar to ordering pizza toppings. I selected sausage, hot peppers and fresh spinach. What arrived on my plate was a huge stromboli, big enough for two dinners. Of course it was fattening as could be, but worth the calories. My husband ordered the mushroom ravioli and enjoyed that as well. We also gobbled down some slices of delicious Italian bread - made on the premises, we were told by our waitress. (we were hungry after that walk on the Pine Creek Rail Trail!)
Also not photographed, but also recommended, is Zwahlen's of Audubon, PA (yes, the same Audubon who did the famous bird paintings - he had lived nearby). We'd done some serious walking on the Saturday of our trip, on a hot and humid day. Had a relatively light dinner too, so I felt ice cream would be a good ending for the day. We weren't up to driving very far to get some, though.
Was in luck again when I searched on Yelp - it turned out that an ice cream parlor, Zwahlen's, was literally right across the street from our hotel! (Homewood Suites) We'd seen the building as we'd driven up to the hotel, but didn't realize it was an ice cream parlor. The building looked more like it housed a restaurant.
Zwahlen's ice cream is very good and reasonably priced as well. They also make a variety of chocolate candies. It's worth a stop if you're in the area - say, to learn some history at Valley Forge (or go to the nearby casino if that's your thing!)
Lots more I could have shown off, and lots more I could have taken photos of, but I hope you got a sense of the scenic, historic areas we visited.
Hello! I knew that the June/July ICAD (index card a day) Challenge would include the week we would be on vacation at the end of July. So, along with clothes, tourism info and other necessities, I packed some index cards, a glue stick, and scissors.
Since I'd already enjoyed doing collage work on a few index cards, I thought it'd be fun to continue this during the trip - I'd grab brochures, newspapers and such to create collages representative of the areas we visited.
I ended up doing four such collages, and I think they turned out pretty well! See for yourself:
#1 Pittsburgh, PA
My collage pays homage to the Pittsburgh Steelers (their fans are among the most devoted sports fans I've ever seen), Kennywood (an amusement park founded in 1898), the Strip District (popular restaurants, ethnic grocery stores and nightlife), the skyline along the river (there's rivers all over the place) and the historic neighborhoods.
#2 Winterthur, a museum near Wilmington, DE
Since we only toured the Winterthur gardens this time, I didn't get to see the ongoing Downton Abbey exhibit. But since we used to be Winterthur members, I'm confident that the exhibit would have been worth viewing. Winterthur is a top-notch place; anything they do is worth viewing!
My collage shows off other Winterthur highlights, such as one of the lavishly-decorated rooms one can tour, an example of garden statuary, and the Enchanted Woods, a fanciful children's garden. The upcoming "Truck & Tractor Day" is also geared toward kids.
#3 Williamsport PA and surrounding area
The Little League organization got its start in Williamsport. The Williamsport Crosscutters, an A-level minor league affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies, play at historic Bowman Field.
For us, no trip to Williamsport would be complete without a trip to Wegmans, which is an upstate NY grocery store chain. For one thing, it's a short walk from the hotel we use (the downtown Hampton Inn), and has a good food court perfect for a quick meal. When we want a sit-down meal, we'll head to Bullfrog Brewery, also a short walk from our hotel.
We didn't go to Woolrich's flagship store this time, but have been there frequently. It's a short drive from Williamsport.
Also a relatively short drive away is the Pine Creek Rail Trail. Supposedly USA Today ranked it one of the top ten trails in the world. I don't know what the other nine trails on their list are, but I do know that the Pine Creek Rail Trail is very nice indeed. We walked along a short segment of it a few days ago. The scenery is wonderful!
#4 Ithaca, NY
A two-hour trip from Williamsport, Ithaca isn't exactly a hop, skip and a jump away, but we like the funky college town vibe. Our visit began with an early lunch at the Ithaca Bakery, where I had the sandwich shown, Augie's New Spiedie (spiedie is a marinated meat preparation from Endicott, NY).
For me, no visit to Ithaca is complete without a stop at Sew Green, a fabric/craft supply thrift store. This time I left the store with a craft book, two current craft magazines and a bulging bag of fabric scraps (pick and choose from several baskets, so I got just what I wanted). I paid a grand total of $4 for all. The price of those two magazines would have been almost $23 alone! But they were each 25c.
Social justice and sustainability are important topics in Ithaca. Thus, a local business is "Food Justice Certified" and the county runs a Food Scraps Recycling program.
Green Star Natural Foods Market is the local food co-op. We always tour food co-ops when we come across them. Health food stores just aren't quite the same.
"Hot Truck", I've gathered, is a local food truck beloved by Cornell University students. It's known for its pizza-like creations on French bread.
And there you have it, mini-tours of four of our vacation stops, each with its own local flavor captured on an index card. I admit, it took a bit of time to make each collage, since I could only use small-scale images and copy. But it was fun to do and now I have four souvenirs, free of charge!
Hello! While going through some vintage magazines recently, I came across a couple of mother-daughter ads that I found amusing, so I'm sharing them here.
From 1950:
Above, Mother and Daughter are look-alikes, from their matching hairstyles down to their ...well, no, their footwear isn't identical. Daughter wears Mary Janes with anklets while Mother wears - of course - strappy black high heels.
Their facial expressions of delight are matching as well:
And as to why they're so delighted? Why, it's all due to Hero's "Measure Knit" knitting needles - "THE PERFECT KNITTING NEEDLES WITH THE RULER RIGHT ON THEM!"
I'm not a knitter, so I don't know if there are knitting needles still made with "the ruler right on them". Seems like a good idea though.
Not sure of the date for the next ad, but it could be from around the same time as the first one.
Similar matchy-matchy look, although the hairstyles are different - braids vs. a short do. But both are wearing short-sleeved yellow tops with black skirts. Footwear is similar to that shown in the first ad.
I love the retro kitchen and the mother's modelesque pose
but the whole purpose of the photo is the modeling of the aprons. They were made from commercial patterns and were described as follows:
"JUNIOR PINAFORE, just like mother's apron, makes learning to cook lots more fun. White organdy shoulder ruffles, dainty embroidery trim in lazy-daisy flowers...Pattern with blue transfer, 25c"."
"MOTHER'S APRON, sweet as a little girl's pinafore. Party pretty in pastel percale, with flattering crispness of organdy at shoulders. Embroidery, one tone darker than apron color...Pattern, blue transfer, 35c."
So let's see - first Mother and Daughter (that is, if Daughter is learning to sew as well learning to cook) were to sew their own aprons, including the ruffled organdy bit, then embroider them before setting foot into the kitchen. After all that work, I'm not sure I'd want to let my daughter wear something so fancy while cooking. Come to think of it, I wouldn't want to wear such an apron while cooking either!
I did make an apron for our daughter when she took a cooking class as a youngster. It was a very easy pattern though - no ruffled organdy, no embroidery. Shame on me!
(Note: I was curious about those 25c/35c prices, so using 1950 as the year, I plugged those sums into this calculator to see what the costs would be today. The results were $2.47 for the junior pinafore and $3.46 for the mother's apron. Those are good prices by today's standards, as sewing and craft patterns have gotten expensive.)
Hello! At the end of May I showed off a stitched piece, seen HERE. As stated in my blog post, I learned that the mesh included in the hoop appeared to be something called "radio weave cane" and was used in chair caning.
This was a new one on me, the use of that material for counted cross-stitch. But lo and behold, I came across another radio weave cane/embroidery hoop combo a few weeks ago, at the same thrift store where I'd purchased the first one. This time, the mesh had been inserted in a 8" diameter embroidery hoop.
My friend Ms. Kayak Chickee thoughtfully gave me copies of several counted cross-stitch patterns that she thought might work for this hoop. I settled upon the one that depicted a fanciful spiral.
For embroidery floss colors, I thought a rainbow would be nice, but wasn't sure which of the hundreds of DMC colors would work. Fortunately, an online search revealed that someone else had already done the picking for me. Her choices looked like they'd work well together, so I went with that.
Here's how it turned out:
A close-up:
For the record, I used DMC colors 321,740, 743, 704, 799, 550 and 311. Going in that order of floss used, I switched colors after every row and repeated the order until I was done.
Not sure if I like this, though - maybe would have been better if I'd stuck to one color? The design also seems a little plain by itself in the hoop. Perhaps I'll add some backstitching around the perimeter of the spiral to expand on the design a bit.
Or maybe I'll take it apart and stitch something else in its place. At least I've gained a list of DMC colors to use the next time I want to stitch a rainbow!
Hello! Christmas may still seem far away, but it's Christmas all year long at some of the local thrift stores, and there are holiday goodies to be found at estate and garage sales as well. I'll show off some recent purchases in this post.
Five Christmas magazines, ranging from 1965-1970.
I was most interested in the top magazine, McCall's Christmas Make-It Ideas, which is from 1965. Always fun to see vintage craft ideas - never know which ones can be updated with today's more plentiful craft supplies. The close-up above of the cover shows "Pompon Santa...a merry yarn and felt toy" and "Clever lion hides a surprise" (ie,it's meant to be a gift box). I'm not tempted to make either project, but there's undoubtedly several others in this magazine that are worth trying.
Newer magazines:
Better Homes and Gardens Christmas Ideas is from 1993, so not super-new, of course. Has a number of old-fashioned crafts and also features several artisans who do old-time crafts like woodcarving and turning eggs of various sizes into fanciful Christmas ornaments.
Well-Styled Home Vintage Holiday Christmas is from last year. I was delighted to find this magazine at a thrift store since I had coveted it at the grocery store magazine section last fall. The $9.99 price stopped me, but by waiting several months, I was able to save $9.49 - worth the delay.
I was especially pleased by this find since specialty magazines like this rarely show up at thrift stores and other secondhand markets - at least, not in my experience. Not surprising, really, since these magazines are loaded with beautiful photography and are more expensive than monthly magazines. They're meant to be more like keepsakes, I think.
A couple of decorative items:
The fake greenery ball is tacky, I know, but I bought this for the little (about 3"h) elf on top. He's missing a boot and a bit of trim on his hat but is still plenty cute. No identifying label but I suspect this is a vintage "Made in Japan" decoration.
Also of unknown vintage, but considered collectible:
From Butticki of Sweden, a wood and fabric figure resting on a wooden sled. The piece measures about 3 3/4"h x 3 3/4"l. Perhaps because they're handmade, items from this company sell for quite a bit more than the small price charged at a local thrift store. I'd never pay the original asking price, but don't mind paying under a dollar!
Now, to look over that 1965 McCall's Christmas Make-It Ideas magazine - bet it's worthy of another blog post!
Hello! A couple of years ago I purchased a heart-shaped, copper-colored wire form at a thrift store. The heart is 9 1/2"h x 8 1/2"w, and came with a 12" long hanger. At the base of the heart is a 2" long spike; perhaps a votive candle was supposed to be stuck onto it. Or maybe there's a missing part to the whole thing. Sometimes one plays a guessing game when the original packaging is absent.
No matter - I figured I could dress up the heart in some way and turn it into a decorative outdoor piece. Inspiration finally struck yesterday, so I'll show off what I created.
First, the "before" shot:
Dangling from the dining room chandelier, the heart awaits its transformation.
At first, I thought of wiring some beads around the four sections of the heart, but thought that winding fabric strips around those sections would look nice too.
Ultimately I did both. I cut some colorful fabrics into strips and glued them onto the heart, then attached beads randomly with thin wire. Lastly, I dug into my collection of "bling" (parts of old costume jewelry and other bits) to add a bit more sparkle.
And here's the heart now, all glammed up:
As hoped, the beads sparkle in the sun, and the hanging heart dresses up our front porch a bit. The project was very easy to do and I think it turned out pretty well. This sort of design can go from charming to clunky in an instant, so I tried to stop at "charming". I think I succeeded - if I decide differently later, I can always take the beads and bling off and try something else!
