Thanks for the tip, Mom and Dad!

I made a pretty good thrift score today.  Something I have been wanting/needing for some time.  A tall, narrow shelf for the booth.  And it's all thanks to my parents, who pointed me to exactly what I needed at a really good price!

I usually try to spend time with my wonderful parents on Mondays, and yesterday was a gorgeous day.  We met up and went to lunch at the Rib Shack on Natural Bridge in North County (very tasty, by the way!), and over lunch they mentioned that they had recently been down to Globe Drug on Broadway, and saw some shelving they thought would fit the bill for me.  I was excited to check it out, but not just then, because after lunch  we decided to have a little fun and visit the Zoo:

Sea lions always seem to be having so much fun.
The way the sunlight dances in the water must have
 something to do with it, don't you think?

I am convinced stingrays come from another planet entirely.
Just look at those alien bodies!  Also?  I got splashed by a shark!

 My favorite little zoo buddies, the Prairie Dogs, for some reason were in a posing mood for me yesterday:

     


The day also included Ted Drewes Concretes, and some good quality relaxing time watching last week's So You Think You Can Dance, which my sweet Mother records for me.  So clearly there was no time for a run to Globe drug at the time, we were too busy having fun!

So this morning after a couple of other errands, I made my way down there and found some great options.  Some of them I would have liked to have snatched up were too heavy and bulky to deal with all on my own, so I went with one that was lightweight and very functional, if not all that stylistically interesting.  I forgot to get a shot of it on its own, so here it is in its new home in Boot 78 at Kenrick Antique Mall, already laden with goodies:

Just the tall skinny shelf I've been looking for.  Plenty of room for treasures!

Stay tuned tomorrow for the big booth overhaul that went along with the handy new shelf.  In the mean time, here are a few other new bits, like some prairie-esque goodness for Fall, in both preppy and hippy styles!

       

And two very different examples of a little too much of everything:

High-collared, puffy sleeves, itty bitty pleats
and lace.  Victorian prim, although that strip
of lace down the front/center is not lined, so
there's a tiny bit of secret raciness going on.

Proof that 1970's craftiness knew no bounds.
A men's work shirt (JC Penney Big Mac)
with bandanna-flower appliques, eyelet lace
trim all over, and fancy red stitching.

And one example where, in my opinion, all the ribbons and lace and fancy stitching gets it just right, if you can see it (I'm not sure if I'm having trouble with my digital images, or my screen display, but everything's looking kind of blown out.  Can you see the details, or is it a white glare?  I just don't know!):

Pale, pale pink vintage Barbizon
bed-jacket (jammies top?)

So yes, if you're wondering, I am gearing up for Halloween costume-y goodness.  And here's one more little unrelated item that is also a bit over the top:

Fun psychedelic satin covered magic magnetic
photo album.  Flower (and paisley) Power!! 

Tomorrow night I'll post about all the rearranging I did at the booth today.  In the mean time, enjoy these fun link-ups I'm joining up with tonight:

Me and My Shadow's Magpie Mondays, Coastal Charm's Nifty Thrifty Tuesday, and, late to the party, Cap Creation's Thrifty Love Link Party.  And say goodbye to Beez Rental Design's Frugal Treasures Tuesdays, where the pretty peacock-y mugs I posted about last week were featured.  She's discontinuing the link-up, but her blog is still a fun read!

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!