Gettin' Crafty, part two!

Hey guys, remember Friday, when I told you all about my brilliant plan for a scruffy old stand-less globe I found at the thrift store, and some light-bright style colored pegs?

Globe

Pegs

The plan was to mark places on the globe that were significant to me with the pegs, and rig it up as a light, but all I could find around the house to poke holes for the pegs was a thumbtack, which was less than ideal, so I didn't get very far that night.  Well I worked 12 hours Saturday, so there was no time to go buy a better hole-poking tool, but I did have a screw loose somewhere (as you've probably already figured out about me!) that was about the right size to make holes for the bigger pegs, and the thumbtack made a good starter for the smaller ones, so I just kept poking and pegging last night.  Then this afternoon between lunch after church and helping my friend pick up my Dad's old weight bench and weights, we stopped by Home Depot and I bought a swag/pendant light cord/chain kit and a light socket, and I just spent the last hour or so rigging that up.  It's not completely finished; I need to hang another hook for the chain/cord, as it's currently just hanging down and dragging the floor, and the raw edge where I badly exacto'd out Antarctica could use some cleanup, and to be perfectly honest, I need to visit Asia and more of the Southern Hemisphere so I can make it look more interesting, but I'm pretty proud of it so far!

I used to have a candelabra thingy on this hook, but candles dripped everywhere
if I lit them, and my living room was way too dark.  Improvement!

I used the bigger, pointy-topped pegs to mark places I've lived: St. Louis, MO; Abilene, TX; Brussels, Belgium and Mauritius (I left out Columbia, MO because the globe is just not big enough for two big pegs that close together).  Then the smaller pegs mark other places I've been that are important to me, either because people I care for live/d there, or because I enjoyed them so much myself.  Here are a few close-ups, to give you a better idea:

Like I said, it's not perfect, but I'm pleased; my living room is brighter and there's a little bit of my wanderlust right here on display!  What do you think?

Found link-up to join for my little fit of craftiness - check it out!:
Craft-o-maniac's Craft-o-Maniac Monday.
Also linking to last Friday's Cap Creations Thrifty Love Link Party (where my fancy, fancy china was featured from last week's link-up!), Chic on a Shoestring's Flaunt it Friday and The Thrifty Groove's Thrifty Things Friday and Between Naps on the Porch's Metamorphosis Monday.

Gettin' crafty

Remember when you were a little kid, and you'd have your army men or your Barbies, or your My Little Ponies, or your Matchbox cars?  Action figures?  Muppet Babies?  Whatever they were, do you remember how fun it was to make up little worlds for them?  My best friend in elementary school had this awesome area in her backyard that was like the rain forest for Barbie.  If we turned the sprinkler on there was even a waterfall.  And shoe box villages for Fisher Price Little People were at least as fun as the store bought schoolhouses and things (with the exception of the houseboat, because you could totally play with that in the bathtub!).  In the summers at the Lake of the Ozarks with my cousins, we would build mazes out of Legos and try to make the frogs we caught hop through them.  And who hasn't spent hours building elaborate blanket forts?

To me, there's always been something of that same feeling in maps.  When I unfold a road map and trace my finger along a highway, that whole world of imagined possibilities opens up again.

Map of Missouri, my home state

Probably most trips along the line I'm tracing are just long, tedious drives to get from point A to point B, just like the Barbie rain forest in my friend's backyard was just a tangle of weeds her dad had to deal with.  But looking at the map, reading off the names of towns I've never visited, I can just about feel the wind buffeting my hand as I let it dip and rise out the car window, and I can picture the greasy spoons and the 'World's Largest Somethingorother' in that pretend place in my mind, where everything's like the fun parts of Thelma and Louise.  On a world map, I'm Indiana Jones, my finger tracing flights to exotic adventures:

Or take a globe... I defy you to spend more than 5 minutes in a room alone with a globe without playing the game.  You know the game - we all do!  You spin the globe, you close your eyes, and you put your finger down and see where you end up, and you hope it's Paris, or Tibet, or maybe Alaska, but if it's someplace like Uzbekistan, you make a mental note to see what Wikipedia says about Uzbekistan, because that's kind of awesome too.  Maps let me play pretend, and globes let me dream big, and when I spotted a poor battered globe without a stand on half-price day at Value Village a few months ago, I immediately new exactly why I needed it.

I'm not terribly crafty outside the confines of my skull.  In there, I'm always making stuff, and it always turns out great.  In the real world, I'm like the kid who can't quite cut on the lines, or who glues my fingers together.  But the minute I spotted the globe, I flashed back to a few months prior to that, when I came across a whole bag of Lite Brite pegs at Unique Thrift, and foolishly passed them up.  I picked them up, even put them in my cart, but then I scolded myself and put them back because I had no practical use for them and really, really didn't need them.  And now I had a globe, and an idea, but no Lite Brite pegs to make it happen!

I looked into buying pegs and was not thrilled with the prices, and then the other reason I'm not really all that crafty kicked in.  I'm easily distracted, and generally bad at follow-through.  All idea, no execution.  But after Monday, I feel so motivated, that I did the unthinkable on my lunch break this afternoon.  I followed through!  Well, partly.  I stopped in at Hobby Lobby, and while they don't have Lite Brite pegs per se, they do have these, in the doll house section:

I bought two kinds.

I'm sure by now you've probably sussed out my clever plan.  I'm going to poke these into the globe in places that are significant to me like pins in a map on the wall, and make a light fixture (lampshade? pendant light?).

So here's the before:

Sitting in a bowl so it will hold still.  At half off of $1.51, it was a no-brainer!

I cleaned the price off with a damp napkin and took an exacto knife to Antarctica:

Still not great at cutting on the line, but it's round-ish!

Mary Poppins was intrigued:

Now the problem is getting the pegs into the thick cardboard with nothing but a thumbtack as a piercing tool.  I've got half a dozen or so in, but then my thumbs got tired, so that's as far as I've gotten so far.  Stay tuned! Once I get some sort of actual tool and get all the pegs in, I'll have to come up with a plan for exactly how to make it into a light.  What do you think?  I'm always open for advice!

Lovely Sunday with a cherry on top

Sunday was so nice - a friend suggested after church that we check out the Indie Craft Revolution, at the Mad Art Gallery in Soulard.  I was all for that, for a number of reasons, so we went, and had such a nice time.  With pretty piles of clouds in the sky and the smell of the brewery infusing everything, we got to check out the gorgeous 1930s police station that Mad Art is housed in:

The only pic I remembered to take - Melanie in Craft Jail.
I definitely have to go back to get pics of the building, for real!

We met a crafter who does gorgeous pottery who it just so happens goes to our church, saw all sorts of clever crafts, watched my friend Todd fall in love with and buy "for his wife" an adorable sleepy-eyed plushy creature and saw the completely lovely vintage-boutique-trailer that a local St. Louis vintage seller/blogger rolled out for the first time this weekend.  And I bought a rock. Actually, I pawed and inspected a bunch of rocks before buying one.  I can't help it.  I have a thing for rocks, as this shot of my kitchen windowsill suggests:

My bathroom sink houses even more of them :) 

So when I saw a table covered in fist to softball sized rocks cut in perfect slices with little rubbery feet added to each slice to make a natural, sculptural, puzzle-y set of stone coasters, I was entrigued.  Here's a shot of one, from his website,  http://www.stonesters.com:

Check out the website if you're at all interested.  I love them - each one a unique collaboration between the crafter and the creator.  Reminds me of a hero of mine, Andy Goldsworthy.  Here are a couple of his art/nature collaborations:

From:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/goldsworthy.html# 

From:  http://thinkorthwim.com/2010/02/17/andy-goldsworthy/ 

So I couldn't help myself.  I bought a rock for my Dad for his birthday.  And I think he even likes it.

When we'd finished perusing the craft show, we went looking for an estate sale I'd heard about in the same general neighborhood.  We found it (Yay!), but it had ended (rats!).  But wait, there were people lined up outside the door still (huh?).  So we went to check it out, and there was a sign on the door that said the sale had ended about 20 minutes before, but in 10 minutes they would be re-opening the doors, and anything that they gave the ok on, you could have it.  For free (my favorite price - YAY!).

If we had had a big truck or something, we'd have snatched up so much stuff!  But even without it, we scored pretty big!  Melanie got 4 nice old wooden chairs for her dining table and Todd and Beth got 8 or 10 awesome stack-able molded plastic-seated chairs in a range of mid-century colors that were filthy but nifty, and I got two vintage suitcases, a very cool sort of depression-era outsider-art looking mirror, and this thing:

A little chicken house?  Rabbit, maybe? Sorry about the slant, it was wedged in
between the legs of a chair.

It's amazing and rustic and clearly improvised.  Do you see the two totally different hinges on the little door?  And the metal roof?  If you look inside and up, you can see that it was once an old sign.  

And here's a slightly better shot of the chairs, with one of the old suitcases I picked up visible as well:

There were, I believe, 4 different colors of the chairs, all in this sort of robot-y stacking shape.

Do you see the tag laying there?  They were practically giving these chairs away to begin with at $5.00 apiece, but we're such accidental pros that they got them completely free!  But I feel like I made an even bigger steal, since the chicken house thingy (did I mention it has a handle on top?) was marked $75.00, and nobody stopped me from walking out with it for nothing!

Free stuff - the cherry on top of a nearly perfect Sunday!  How about you?  Any treasures lately?  

I'm sharing my treasures in these link-ups again this week:

Her Library Adventures Flea Market Finds, Me and My Shadow's Magpie Mondays, Cap Creations Thrifty Love Link Party, and Beez Rental Design's Frugal Treasures Tuesday and Apron Thrift Girl's Thrift Share Monday (welcome back!).  Go check them out!

And also, if you haven't yet, go Like http://www.facebook.com/2ndhandMoon, where I'll post regular updates and pics from the booth and where first news of deals, sales and events will go!

Update on the little pot from Monday and a thrift FAIL (or, laterally speaking, a chance for thrift genius)!

Hi all!  I still haven't unpacked my biggest and most interesting score from Monday, but here, as a consolation prize, is a cheap plastic item that will probably make you smile:

HEY, KOOL-AID!

But wait, there's more!  Remember the little pot from my first post?  The one with the sort of repeating Rorschach glaze pattern?  Well, I just happened to see a seemingly similar glaze style on an ash tray yesterday afternoon in the basement at Retro 101 on Cherokee Street (a very cool shop - any St Louisans with a yen for retro goodness, especially clothing, accessories and "smalls", needs to check it out!).  The ash tray in question had a sticker on it that read "Treasure-Craft, Compton, CA".  So I came home and googled Treasure Craft, and while I didn't find anything exactly like my pot, here's a Treasure Craft tidbit tray with very similar glaze colors and style:

from SWANKmoderndesign.com

More interesting still, when I googled "pottery glaze rorschach", Item #3 was this.  So what do you think?  Did I find the origin of my little pot?  It seems like a pretty reasonable guess, at least.


On another note entirely, I picked up a pair of slightly-too-big but very comfortable and seemingly sturdy desert boots while thrifting awhile back, and I've worn them a few times, and quite liked them until today, when the sole of the right boot started just peeling away, like so:

Thrifted desert boots - luckily I didn't pay much.

Now, this happened about 3 hours into a 12 hour work day, and as you can see, the sole peeled off quite a bit.  In order to make more than 2 steps without tripping, I had to walk like I was either:
A. Igor (or whatever Doctor Frankenstein's assistant was called), or
2. in a Monty Python sketch.

So on the one hand, giant fail of a seemingly good thrift find.  On the other hand... opportunity.  I can either:
A. throw them out - they're no good to anyone now.
2. look into shoe glue and try to fix them, because they really are very comfy and the materials are really good, even if they apparently weren't stuck together very well, or
C. try something crazy!

You know I can't just do A.  I'd have to at least try something else first, or I'd feel guilty.  So here's the inspiration for the Something Crazy I'm thinking about.  I apologize for the quality of the picture; I basically took a picture with my decent camera of an old snapshot I took years ago that's in a frame under glass that's, quite frankly, not very clean:

An old shoe (probably my grandfather's) 

on a concrete table under an overgrown arbor.

Now, I'm not sure how other people will react to this.  Some folks might think this picture is gross.  I think it is fabulous on a number of levels, including:

A. I love the idea of this small physical representation of nature reclaiming it's own.

2. It looks flippin' cool.

C. It's just so ODD!

So I've had this fascinating image in my mind (and on my tv stand) for ages, and recently, I came across this:

From this interesting site I need to peruse more,

where they have a recipe for growing moss wherever you like!

Now, I live in a postwar bungalow in South St Louis city surrounded by zoyzia grass rather than an old English garden or something more suited to this lovely and intriguing art form, but I filed the idea away for "someday", now that I know a recipe exists.  So today, when my really very cool (if slightly too big) desert boots decided to fall apart, I have to admit, I'm thinking hard about giving this a try.  I'm not sure what I'd do with Moss Boots once I had them, but surely something would come to me... right?

What do you think?  Try to repair, or collaborate with Mother Nature on a weird little art project?