Oodles and oodles

Word games

Let's play a word game. Let's think of other words for "bad." Terrible. Awful.  Pitiful. Lamentable. That's how the thrifting has been lately. It's taken me all week and several thrifting trips just to collect enough for a single post.

 
This was my only purchase last week: a blue tulip sugar bowl by Cronin China Co. I don't know why this pattern isn't more popular. (You can usually get it for a song on eBay.) It's so cheerful and sweet.

 
Yesterday's only find was this pretty bib apron, which appears to be in tip-top shape. It's nice that, if I'm not finding much, at least it all looks nice together.

 
Today's stop was better. I found the blocks in the first photo, and this pajama pattern.

We'll pull back from the pattern and see what's underneath. Hooray! It's feedsack. Not a whole feedsack but a nice print. And you know what was under that feedsack?


Yes, another one. With that telltale string that means it hasn't been opened.

Let's think of other words for happy. Glad. Delighted. Gleeful. All of those.
 


 

The best bunnies

 
I could be wrong, but I can't imagine ever finding any Easter decoration I love more than these old spun-cotton bunnies.

They're perfect in every way. I found them at a sale (kind of a perpetual estate sale) a couple of years ago. They were a dollar each. I left the little price tags on the bottom just to give me one more thing to love about them.

Each of them has a little spun-cotton basket with a pipe cleaner handle and forget-me-nots.
 
They each have velvet ears, too. The face has faded on the other bunny, but you can still just barely make out this bunny's happy expression.

We've only got another week together, until Easter. Then they'll go back to their burrow for another year. I'm always sorry to see them leave. 
  
  

Those were the days

 

There was a time when I'd have begged my mom to make me something out of this fabric. Maybe an A-line dress. Or a summery top to wear with white pedal-pushers. But I'm too old for that now. Even if I didn't think I was too old for it, my daughter surely would.

 

There was a time when I'd have thought this dress was the height of sophistication.

 

Particularly if it was made out of this fabric. (Super-silky, 100 percent polyester, as if you couldn't guess.)

 

I'd have spent at least several summer afternoons holed up in my bedroom, longingly looking at every single outfit in the 1968 Butterick and Vogue Home Catalog (which is in my Etsy shop).
 
 

I'd have thought this was the most awesome fabric I'd ever seen. I'm fairly sure I'd have been able to talk my mom into making me a bedspread and curtains out of it, and painting the walls of my room green. (I wouldn't have thought that pink was cool enough, and she'd have never gone with orange.)

 

I'd probably have wondered whether I should pick this fabric for my room instead, but I think I'd have gone with the paisley.

But those days are behind me now. It's time to let go of the 60s. I've listed more stuff on eBay this week than I'd have thought humanly possible, and my fabulous collection of 1960s fabrics and patterns will, I hope, find an appreciative new home. Tomorrow, I'm jumping in my time machine and going back to the late 1800s and listing all of my nice old calicos and homespuns. I'm somewhere in between those vastly different eras now. And if I were to keep a pattern that I think best fits my style now, it would probably ...

 

 be this one. 
 
  
  
 
  
  

A bit of yellow

 
 

I bought the Hoosier last year because I needed more storage space. If it needs to be decorated from time to time for various holidays, so be it. For its first Easter in our house, the Hoosier is wearing the traditional Easter colors of yellow and red.

 

The glass jar came from a sale that I went to with Linda. Later, she saw another jar just like it and picked it up for me. Good work, Linda! This is the time of year for the daffodil Swanky Swigs to bloom, too.

 

Do you know where yellow and white polka-dotted Easter eggs come from? From yellow and white variegated knit egg cozies, of course. If you don't have such a hen, however, you could paint an egg yellow and then paint on white polka dots. It's up to you, but if you're not so good at making perfect polka dots, you could dip a fresh pencil eraser into a little white paint and stamp them on. The excellent vintage shelf paper, by the way, came from Susan's shop.

 

Because nothing says holiday like a Gurley candle, here's one of my favorites, the panorama egg. (As I'm writing, Mr. Oodles is trying to tell me that we might get a few inches of snow. La, la, la. Mr. Oodles doesn't realize that although it looks as if I'm typing, I'm humming while my fingers are in my ears and I can't hear a single thing he's saying, la, la, la.)
 
 

Some salt-and-pepper flowers are flying in with another lollipop holder. Again, no lollipops.

 

Yet another lollipop holder (you've seen all of them now) and an extremely sweet Gurley chick, which flew all the way here from Laurie's coop in Oregon.

 

And this lovely piece of work was added to the Easter display just this week, when the talented and always entertaining Amy sent me a surprise package. Amy writes the blog Into Vintage and works in a doily factory. Right now might be a particularly good time to visit Amy ...

 

who also sent a package of The Most Adorable Vintage Trim Ever Made ...

 

as well as an entire choir of angels!
 
Even though my house is not awash with Easter decorations, I think I've got at least two more posts on this subject.  
 




 

A little pink

 

I don't decorate much for Easter, but I wasn't about to miss the opportunity to display a sweet little bunny candle. (Gurley, of course, and at one time, 29 cents.)

 

The living room shelves are quiet and almost monochromatic, except for a little pink here and there.

 

This little chick is a lollipop holder. Without lollipops.

 
 
And here's a closer look at the big pink paper mache bunny. There's a school of thought that says once you have a big pink paper mache bunny, you don't need many more decorations for Easter.
 
 

Country living

 
Every spring I think the same thing about living in the country. It consists mostly of moving things. Over the weekend, my husband raked up the gravel that had been plowed out of the driveway, shoveled it into the wheelbarrow, and put it back into the driveway. I raked leaves, piled them into the wheelbarrow, and dumped them along the edge of the woods. He picked up sticks and hauled them out to the brush pile. That's all we do. We pick up things - sticks, stones, rocks, grass clippings, leaves, plants, trees - and put them someplace else.
 
We're also trying to move a groundhog, which is living under our porch. This is also the time of year when we try to get whatever's living under our porch to move. One recent spring it was a fox. Very pretty and kind of cool, but a little scary, living so close. Some years, it's been a skunk. There's just nothing good to say about having a skunk live under your porch. To move wildlife, we set a Have-a-Heart trap. We've never caught a single thing in it, but the sight of it seems to scare off the trespassers. 


In case you were wondering, this is not the wheelbarrow we use for all of our chores. This is a decorative wheelbarrow. I have kind of a soft spot for wheelbarrows, perhaps because I spend so much time using one. If you look around the base of the wheelbarrow, you can see all kinds of bulbs poking up. There's a lot to do when spring comes, but there are a lot of rewards, too.
 
The fabulous weather this weekend has really given me gardening fever. Even the empty pots in my messy shed look good to me. I have more ideas than I could ever get done in a lifetime, let alone a season. Pushing a wheelbarrow gives you a lot of time to think and dream.
 
A cover photo on one of the spring gardening magazines features an old red shed with a white door, a vintage metal lawn chair, and all kinds of flea market what-nots. I have, in fact, an old red shed with a white door, a vintage metal lawn chair, and all kinds of flea market what-nots. What I don't have, which the cover photo has, is an abundance of flowers. So I took a picture of my shed, in the hopes that I'd come up with a garden plan. Here's my shed now. I don't have Photo Shop, just some generic photo editing program, with which I converted my shed photo to black and white, then turned it into a negative, then used the contour line feature. I'm so wild about the result that I almost don't want to draw in the flowers and fence I was thinking about.

My new favorite color

 
It's usually not my favorite color.


In fact, I had to hunt all over the house to find even a few examples of it. (Isn't it astonishing what we'll do when we get a blog idea?)


I figured I might find some among the wrapping paper, and I did.


And in some crochet.


Even at Easter, when you might expect to see it, it's in fairly short supply at my house.


It's not like I have anything against purple. Especially a purple fuzzy chick. But it's just never been one of my favorites.


But it is today.


And from now on, when it is 60 degrees and sunny, and the crocus pop, and it is not yet the first day of spring, my favorite color will be purple.  
 
 

Luck

 
I'm not Irish. My husband is. In fact, there's a mountain pass somewhere in Ireland named after his great-great-grandfather, who became a local hero after pelting some British intruders with rocks. My mother's side is British, so it might have been my ancestors hit by the rocks thrown by his ancestor. We try not to talk about it much. Anyway, I'm not Irish, but I'm lucky, because I found this towel at the thrift store today.

I found this Ohio Art top, too. I loved tops when I was a kid and couldn't wait to get home to give this one a spin. It alarmed the pets. I had fun, though.
 
We're having a very unusual St. Patrick's Day here. It's sunny and warm (by Central New York standards), and all but a few icy patches of snow have melted. One of the local golf courses is open, and my husband and son are heading out to play. The crocus are showing some color. I think we may have an atypical St. Patrick's Day cookout for dinner.


Even the ironing pile is looking good to me today. I am lucky. Even if I'm not Irish. 
 

Tick tock, here are some clocks

 
You turned your clock ahead an hour, right? (If you live in the United States, that is. I don't know if other countries follow this time-change practice or not, but I'd be interested in knowing.) Anyway, I sure hope you have changed your clocks by now, because it's after 8 p.m. Sunday as I'm writing this, and you probably won't be reading this until Monday, and if you haven't changed your clocks yet, your life probably is hopelessly out of control at this point.

It was rather late Sunday afternoon when I thought that posting pictures of clocks would be a good idea as we switch to daylight savings time. It probably would have been a better idea to do it in advance, as a reminder, but that's the thing about losing an hour. Our brains get all scrambled up.

I've never thought of myself as much of a clock collector, but I do have three of them. And I do like that they serve a practical purpose. This one, which is the first clock I acquired, in a dollar box lot at an auction, is kind of the original digital clock. It has these dials that flip around rather loudly. When the hour changes, there are three loud clicks in succession. That could be annoying, but I kind of like it.

 
This clock came from one of the worst auctions I've ever attended. The house was an utter disaster. However, the clock is one of my favorite things in the world, so the auction ended up being worthwhile. A lovely chime sounds on the hour, and I miss the sound when I'm away from home.

 
For some reason, this clock has never found a permanent spot in our house. In fact, I just brought it down from a closet, and I remembered how much I like it. They were mass-produced and not terribly valuable or rare, but I still think it's extraordinarily pretty.


There's a dial on the bottom that's supposed to be a guide for the planting season. I wouldn't count on its accuracy, but it's a pretty touch. One of the problematic things about this clock is that while I easily can figure out how to set the time, I don't have any idea how to set the dial on the bottom or the dial for the phases of the moon. If any of you know, please tell me how!

 
And here it is in its entirety. The case is quite nicked up, and I've thought from time to time about painting it.
 
The beginning of daylight savings time can be jarring - I've always hated losing that hour, even if it's only away on loan until the fall. But it's definitely a sign of spring, and we can always use those.  
 

 

Thrifting fix-ups

This bluebird caught my eye at a thrift store Wednesday.


Sadly, there was a fatal flaw. A big chunk out of the piece, just in front of the baby bluebird. Which was too bad, because everything else had survived so nicely, even that delicate pink blossom and the leaves.


Well, there were other things to be found at the store, such as this tablecloth. It did not look nearly this bright and pretty when I found it, but a little tender loving care brought it right back to life. (It's on a very small table on my deck - I needed every ray of sunlight I could get today.)
 

The store also had these flower favor cups.

 
And yards of velvet ribbon, and a pile of favor cups (that I ought to have arranged a bit more artfully) that are half-circle shaped baskets with a bell design. All of this came from the same place where I got the patterns that I showed you yesterday. So that turned out to be a very good thrifting trip.
 
But what happened to the bluebirds?

 
As luck would have it, inside the nest was a bundle of newspaper (which I thought was just packing). Fortunately I looked inside it before I left the store, and sure enough, there was another baby bluebird. Which fit perfectly back on the nest. Once again, everything was right with the world.