Flea market finds

So, I mentioned that the Fleaology flea market was coming up HERE and I'm back to report a successful trip. My sister in law came with me and we went to several yard sales on the way home, as well. It's the first time I've been this whole summer. Gasp. I can't believe a whole summer of garage sales got away from me.

Here's the goodies:

{All these were a buck a piece and that ring is already one of my favorites ever.}

{These bookends are HEAVY, like solid brass heavy. They're also weird and I love it.}

{"Flair Squares," right? I don't know what I'll do with these, but I have 4 packages.}

{The newest scarf in my collection. I just love a '70's scarf, what can I say?}

{My new DIY Christmas ornaments. I'm going to hang the candy cane upside down so it's a J for Johnson.}

{This frame caught my eye and it wasn't until after that I noticed it was a peacock. See my other thrifted peacocks HERE. Now I think I'll keep the doily in it and just switch out the maroon velvet for...something.}

{This little hankie is going to be a pillow.}

{Vintage floral pillowcase! Hooray! It'll go into the quilt I'm gathering fabric for for Eleanor.}

{I found this little Utah cross stitch irresistible. I'm going to leave it exactly as-is and hang it on a gallery wall.}

Indoor cat door

This may seem like a weird thing to some people (or maybe an obvious thing, I don't know), but putting a cat door on our storage room door was genius.

To explain, when our basement was unfinished, Danger (the cat) could just run downstairs to get to her litter box and her food and water. We had a door at the top of the stairs with a chain lock on it, so I would keep that on but the door open and Danger could slip through that little 6 inch gap and my daughters could not. Our stairs looked like this,

{These are some freaky steep stairs, folks.}

so it was really important to make them inaccessible to our toddler.

Well, I started thinking about how I would handle the littler box and the cat food as we got closer and closer to finishing and one day it occurred to me that we could just put a cat door on the storage room door to cut off toddler access to those things (Eleanor is still 2 or 3 inches away from being able to get an actual grip on the door knob, so a closed door will be enough of a deterrent for awhile yet). I wouldn't have to worry about having the door open for Danger and closed for Eleanor. Brilliant!

The installation was very straight forward and simple. I followed the instructions that came with the cat door we got (it was this one) and basically just found the center of the door, traced the shape of the cat door so it would be centered, then cut it out with a jig saw and screwed the door in. So simple.

My jigsaw lines weren't perfect, but the cat door has that little casing bit that covered them up. I'd do a whole hallway shot, but right now the hall leading up to this door is so full of junk that if I backed up much farther the cat door would be obscured by boxes. Hooray!

So, now that I've shared my genius plan, what do you think? Would you have cut a big ol' hole in your brand new door? 

Recreational vinyling

It's a thing; I checked.

I've run across about a billion vinyl deals and sales and whatnot over the past month or so, seems like. So, given my inability to pass up a good deal, I now have quite a bit more vinyl than I used to and in a TON more colors. Over the last week or so I've used up some of my new stock on little projects that just kind of make me smile.

My little painted on birds that I did here were as easy to remove as I'd hoped. No problem at all.

 

His and hers phones. My husband's is some Star Wars thing- I want to say it's the New Jedi Order symbol. (Half sad, half impressed that I know that.) Mine is a pink unicorn because I let Mim pick. 

These are for 2 of my lovely sis-in-laws that both have birthdays in September, as kind of a bonus gift with what they're really getting. The owl is already in place on Alicia's computer (and was about 10 seconds after I told her what it was)- she sort of LOVES owls. 

I've done a few other little Silhoutte doodles, but they're gifts and so must remain secret. 

I think this is the most satisfying kind of little craft to do. I really do smile every time I see my phone or KitchenAid and my husband was so proud of his phone decal he posted it on Reddit and doing them all together took maybe 15 minutes.

Non-permanently painting a KitchenAid

So, I think everyone has seen the custom cut vinyl for KitchenAids. I've seen some crazy intricate ones. Just google "custom kitchenaid vinyl" if you haven't. Wow.

So even though I have a Silhouette and could easily make one for my own, I still haven't, because...reasons. Or not really any reason at all. As it would happen, though, I had some friends come over last night to work on a craft project and we ended up cutting vinyl for their KitchenAids (which was not the project we got together to work on, of course).

I had the vinyl negative left of one of the decals that I held on to because I thought it would make a good stencil for... something. And then it hit me. Why not use it to stencil my KitchenAid? I want to do light blue or yellow vinyl, which I don't have yet, so in the meantime...

I used acrylic paints and tested a little patch first. I just dabbed some on with my finger, let it dry, then made sure it scratched off as easily as I thought it would.

Then...

So that'll hold until I get vinyl in the color I want. There are some parts where it seeped under the stencil, but I'll just wait until it dries and then scratch it off. So easy. I wish I was a talented painter- I'd do an all-over floral design. Sigh. I suppose it wouldn't be worth it, since this probably won't take thorough wipe downs very well.