Create with vintage and found items. Repurpose. Reuse. Paint. Don’t paint. These are tutorials of my DIY and craft successes – as well as pictures of my DIY and craft failures. Keeping it real, my friend. Keeping it real.
This will be a quick post. I just wanted to share these two pictures I bought last weekend. I didn’t buy much at that sale, but couldn’t resist these pics.
Gasp! How shocking! But, Angelina J. could learn a pose from this girl. And at least this young lady has some meat on her bones. Speaking of meat on bones…..
God bless him! But aren’t they both just the cutest things? There were some other pictures of the little boy that made me think he might have been mentally handicapped. I want to hug him and pinch those cheeks. Bet he got a lot of that.
That’s all I have for tonight. Oh! Today was the day Google was supposed to have changed everything up. Did I disappear from your readers or subscriptions or whatever was supposed to happen?
Yay! The first official project of the new craft room/studio, a dog tag and charms necklace, has been thunk up and finished! The room isn’t – finished – but I did move a table in there with a lamp so I could start using it. Still waiting for lighting and a furniture piece and some cabinets.
There must have been a company promoting dog tags to grammar schools in the 1960’s. I’m sure it wasn’t just my school. They weren’t the cool dog tags like our GI’s fighting over in Vietnam had. Ours were… well, they looked like this:
I remember being disappointed it wasn’t like a real dog tag, but still excited to have it. With my name on it and everything. I ran across it the other day and thought it might be cool to add some charms and actually wear it again. It was probably worn for about a month before living the rest of it’s life in my jewelry box. There were some random charms at hand and these were pulled out:
With the result being this:
Do you have one of these dog tags? Or perhaps your mother has one? Why not pull it out and put some charms with it, too? I think it’ll be fun to wear.
Do you know about 5 Dollar French Market on Etsy? I love everything they have! And it’s all $5 each. Obviously. So I thought I’d be a copycat and make some stamped candles like these for the booth. I wouldn’t even think about putting them on Etsy. That’s their gig. They have a corner on that niche and do it extremely well. I’ll be a cheerleader for her. But I saw no harm in making some to sell locally.
(One of my poor attempts.)
So I bought the $10 stamp and the ink. I forget how much the ink is. $6 or so? Then went all over town hunting the cheapest candles. The only place I could find them here was at Wal-Mart. 88¢ each. With all the supplies gathered, I had to figure out how to do it. I researched stamping candles on Google. Found all this annoying stuff about first stamping onto tissue paper then transferring with a heat gun, but it seemed awfully dangerous to have tissue paper melted into a skinny candle. Back to the research and guess what? We can stamp directly on the candle! StazOn ink ain’t goin’ nowhere. (I know this for a fact. I tried to rub it off. It lives up to its name.)
OK. I now know I can stamp directly on the candle, so I experiment with some old candles to figure out the best method. I measured the candle and taped off the part of the stamp that I didn’t want ink on. Tried rolling the candle on the stamp, but they kept going crooked. Finally figured out it worked best for me to roll the stamp on the candle. Best being a laughable word. I’m here to say it is not as easy as it looks! I ended up with six candles in my own candlesticks. Managed to turn them so that the worst parts don’t show. And several that even I won’t use. I did get two sets to the booth, but so far there seems to have been no interest.
(One of the sconces with some of the cast off candles.)
So let me learn the hard way and you learn from me. If you only need a few candles for yourself, order them from 5 Dollar French Market. Save yourself some trouble. And cash. But I’m glad to have the stamp. There will be other uses for it and I’ll keep trying to stamp candles. I have some more sconces in the same room that will need them.
Our friend Tiffany, aka The Cranky Queen, has collected what she calls “Buttless Cats”. You know. Cats with their hiney up in the air and an opening for a cactus, a sponge, a pin cushion… But the label Buttless Cat stuck. We no longer buy them for her because it seems she has one – or two – in every color, shape, size and maker. But I still buy them to sell. This one needed flowers in his… uh… bum. I got this vintage, funky, psychedelic wrapping paper at the estate I’m hauling things from and thought what cute flowers it would make. And it did. But before I thought of making the flowers and giving them to the cat, I thought about making butterflies. So I did. And that’s all I’ve got for today.
I didn’t get out to go to the sales yet again. It must be the heat because not much is going on, although I heard that Tiffany did go to some and got a few cool things. We’ll have to watch her blog to see. Or — I could just hop in the car and go the 3/4 mile to her house and see it in person! Now, how jealous does that make you? 😉
Hi! I'm Wanda, the owner of Just Vintage and this is my blog where I talk about buying, selling, and decorating with all things vintage. I want to help you learn what to buy for resale and maybe give you inspiration in decorating, even if it's what NOT to do.
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