Fabulous Friday Find

The best thing I have found recently was a copy of Lutterloh’s The Golden Rule from 1969. I was buying lots of sewing notions and tools on ebay and it came in a lot of patterns, thread and other such items. It’s a simple red binder, but once I opened it up I knew I had something special.This is a manual of pattern illustrations with the pattern pieces shown in the back with instructions on how to enlarge them to you size (based on only two body measurements). The company is still in business and you can order current designs from them. I have paged through this book numerous times and there is almost nothing that I would not wear. Everything seems to have a timeless quality about it. I am very excited to make something from this book, but there are so many designs to choose from I am having a hard time deciding.
Have any of you hears of Lutterloh’s?

Button Sorting (another button post)

If you follow me on twitter, you already know that I bought 19 pounds of buttons and they arrived on Saturday. I have to say that this is the BEST button collection I have ever seen, there are a lot of fancy buttons and I have to look at them all! The buttons arrived in zip-loc bags, to sort them I put a handful on the gold lid and look at them. Once I am finished with that batch it gets dumped into the gold tin and another handful is added to the lid. When I finish a bag the tin gets dumped back into the original bag and I start a new bag. I have been picking out all the glass, fancy plastic, fancy metal, carved mother of pearl, and other random interesting buttons. I am also picking out marbles, beads, pennies, pins and tacks (it’s a very interesting collection). I am not even half way done, but it is sooooo much fun!
Am I the only one who could sort through buttons all day? What is you favorite kind of button?

Friday Finds

I have had a super busy week of random appointments and meeting, I usually have one crazy week a month where I have what seems like a million things to do. I did find time yesterday to sneak into my favorite antique store. I had Little Man with me and I didn’t get to browse around as much as I would have liked, but I did find a couple of treasures.
When I saw this apron I may have squealed, how adorable is it!?!
This weenie apron is just too kitschy, appliquéd and embroidered it is definitely a treasure. It’s going to look great in my kitchen.
As I was leaving I spotted this little case tucked in a corner and the price was right.The finish is pretty beat up, but the case is still very sturdy. It is a bit musty on the inside, so it will need to air out. There are so many possibilities with this case I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
I’m feeling lucky I may have to hit a few yard sales this weekend. If you’re in the Lincoln (NE) area I will be teaching a free class at Indigo Bridge Books on making Styrofoam stamps, I’d love to see you.
Have a super crafty weekend!

Friday Finds February

We had a great shopping day on Tuesday, on our first stop I found what I thought would be awesome paper dolls from the 60’s. The folders were wrapped in plastic, so I couldn’t see exactly what was inside. Sadly when I unwrapped them the Cinderella set was missing all the dolls and the Barbie set was missing most of the clothes, the folders are fun though and I can still use the pieces that I do have for crafting. On the right you can see the bag of 22 tart pans I scored, hearts, circles and diamonds. I can’t wait to start crafting with them!
We also found a vintage Lite-Brite, still in the box AND with some un-punched designs!!!It also seems to have all of the pegs, I have a great idea for this one, but I’m going to need some more pegs.
We were really lucky with furniture this time. This children’s dresser was just begging to be taken home. It was pretty dirty, in this picture I have cleaned the top two drawers.Little Man is busy spinning the knobs, they are all loose and two are missing, but that is an easy fix. I’m not sure exactly where we will be using this, but it was too sweet to pass up.
Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of our best find, we have to get some help bringing it home. It is a beautiful 1940’s waterfall buffet. Hopefully we’ll get it brought home this weekend, I’ll share photos on Facebook when it gets here.
Have you found any treasures this month? I’d love to see them. Have a super crafty weekend!!!

Vintage Pillowcase Edging

As I dug through my vintage sewing notion collection, looking for spools, I found this:Yes, that is rick rack embellished with crochet! It is very dainty. I have no idea where it came from, but there are two of them which makes me think that they are pillowcase edgings. They have definitely been cut off of something (and not as carefully as they should have been). I did some internet searching and found this tutorial for rick rack edging and lace insertion and it seems to be this exact pattern, how lucky is that? I am definitely going to give this a try! Imagine red rick rack with white and/or turquoise crochet. I’m thinking fun colors would really modernize this design.
No, I haven’t forgotten to post pictures from this weekends show, I forgot my camera and I HAD to have pictures, so I bought a disposable camera. I need to finish the roll before I get it developed (doesn’t that take you back? remember when it took a week to get your pictures?). I now realize how spoiled I am by my digital camera and the instant results!

Vintage Owl Clock

This is one of my vintage finds from our junk store/yard sale day a few weeks ago.  I spotted this clock and thought it was pretty cute and when I saw that it was only a quarter I had to have it.It was really dirty, a combination of greasy and dusty, ewww!  I took the cover off of the clock, removed the clock works and the clock face and scrubbed it down with some Dawn (takes grease out of your way!)Better, I was thinking about painting the whole thing a bright color, like lime green or turquoise, but I wanted to keep those bright orange eyes.  The plastic eyes came right out, the glue must have yielded to the soapy water.  I was trying to polish them up a bit, they were just so scratched and dull, it’s like they had been scrubbed with an abrasive cleaner or sponge.  I had the brilliant idea to use the buffing wheel on my Dremel to shine them up a bit.  It worked great, they looked new.  I was even able to shine the badly scratched cover.The left side looks new, all shiny and clear.  I buffed the entire clock.  It brought back the shine on the plastic too!  I scanned the old clock face, edited out some of the water damage and skewed the colors to give it an orange tint.  Once that was printed out I Mod Podged it onto the clock and put everything back together.It looks brand new and I just finished hanging it up in the craft room.  Not bad for a quarter and some time!  What is your best yard sale/thrift shop redo?, I’d love to see it.
Have a super crafty weekend!

Vintage Patterns and Books

While my husband was on vacation we drove to the little town I grew up in to go to the antique mall/junk store and the city wide garage sale.  We usually have good luck there and this trip was no exception.  We came home with a ton of awesome vintage finds and today I’m going to share a few of them.
I am always on the look out for vintage patterns, the illustrations on the envelopes are eye candy for me.  I love to see the differences in hair and clothing styles.  I also like them to be cheap, chances are I’m not going to be sewing any of these so size and condition are not a huge issue, I like really vintage though, 1970’s or earlier.I love the pockets and yoke details on the three skirts on the left of that McCalls 5113, the three pattern pieces of the super jiffy Simplicity 9032 are great and who doesn’t need a terry cloth tube dress?, full and half slips on Simplicity 9115 (can you even buy slips anymore?), and the last two Simpliciy 7345 and 6653 are 70’s chic and such high and modest necklines!I was super excited when I saw this Barbie pattern, those little dolls outfits are amazing and all of the pieces seem to be intact, although they are all cut out, I bet someone’s Barbie had an awesome wardrobe!  There are even instructions on some embroidered embellishment for one of the skirts.  There are 10 full outfits, the other five are pictured on the back of the patten or you can see the back views of them in this picture.This little man pattern was too precious and when I peeked inside the envelope I found another treasure, there was a letter, some clippings with appliqué examples, and some colorful corduroy fabric swatches.Some lovely sewing and embroidery books also found their way home with me.  That center one has the most delightful, kitschy projects!  I HAD to have this one, I have never seen anything like it and surprisingly some of the projects look really modern, not the windmill sculpture or the owl plaques, but the pendants are nice.These pendants are definitely unique!  I’m wondering where exactly you find horseshoe nails these days? and are they comparable to nails of 1974?  The introduction says this is the perfect hobby for a man <snort>.  Another fun fact, this little pamphlet was published right here in Nebraska!
I hope you enjoyed seeing some of my new treasures, don’t worry I’ll share some more soon, I have a whole collection of crochet pamphlets and some very interesting German magazines.

Vintage Styled Halloween Wreath

I was inspired by this tulle and embroidery hoop wreath at My Modish Mood.  I ended up with an great vintage styled wreath and I’m going to share how I made mine so you can make one too!I followed her instructions using a 12” hoop and black netting instead of tulle (cutting strips 3” wide and 26” long).  I folded the strips in half and pulled the cut ends through the loop to attach it to my hoop.  The wider strips gave my wreath a eerie, tattered look. Using scrap cardboard I cut a ring, the outside measured 14” and the inside measured 9”, and painted it black. I cut some pages from an old, inexpensive book and rolled them into cone shapes, securing them with a staple.  I hot glued the cones to the back of my cardboard circle. I made a paste of Mod Podge and orange glitter and applied that to the outer half of my cardboard circle.  The Mod Podge keeps the glitter from flaking off.  It doesn’t look that impressive wet, but once it dried (and it took forever to dry) it was awesome, sparkly, but not over the top!

Using my sewing machine I zigzagged over some string to gather some crepe paper streamers into ruffles.  Zigzagging over string gives perfectly even gathers, it does slightly tear the crepe paper, but once it’s gathered up it is invisible.  The ruffles we then hot glued to the inner and outer edges of the cardboard circle.  I also hot glued my cardboard circle to my tulle hoop.  Be really generous with the hot glue, you want it to hold together well. I aged some white cardstock with walnut ink.  I used the dialtone font in the largest size(72) and printed it at 200% to spell out Happy Halloween.  It came out the perfect size to be punched out with my 1 1/2” circle punch.  I strung the letters onto gingham printed ribbon and attached that to the wreath. Finally I used orange tulle, grosgrain ribbon, paper and buttons to make some flowers/frills for the bottom of the wreath.

Let me know if you make one, I’d love to see how it comes out.

Traditions and Vintage Patterns

Every 4th. of July there is a big flea market in the little town I’m from and it is my yearly tradition to go. This year we made the drive (about 1 1/2 hours), but it had rained all night and continued to rain all day and most of the vendors were already gone or packed up. We were so disappointed, luckily we were able to shop at the local antique mall (Nebraska translation – junk store). There were a lot of wonderful treasures and I hit the mother load of vintage patterns, the whole stack was bound together with a paper that said $1.00 for all.Here are the token ugly patterns from the 1980’s, maybe they’ll be stylish again in 10 or 20 years. I think these are from the 80’s as well, the one on the left is postmarked 1980. I can’t read the other one, but it is cute, I like the neckline detail. Some fun dresses and pant suits from the 1970’s, these are all really similar in design. The two simplicity patterns are Look Slimmer patterns, whatever that means. More fun 70’s dresses and culottes (is that really how you spell that?, it looks weird). In the very center of the stack DRESS PATTERNS FROM THE 1950’S!!!!! I about wet my pants when I saw these. The most exciting thing about all these patterns is they are my size (or darn close), can you believe it? I see vintage patterns fairly often and they are normally tiny, but these aren’t, they’re all around a size 20 or 22 AND THEY ONLY COST ME A DOLLAR!!!! can you tell I’m excited? Some of them are cut, but they are single sized patterns, not multi, like the modern ones and all of the instruction sheets seem to be intact. I am going to have to give some of these a try.

I found a lot of other great treasures that I’ll share in the future, they are waiting to be fixed, altered, and painted. Even Mr. Crafterella found something exciting for his collections (a vintage gas mask). It was a great day for shopping, even though the traditional 4th. of July flea market rained out. What are your 4th. of July traditions?

Thrifty Thursday – Reclaimed Yarn

Last weekend was, once again, $.99 at the Goodwill and I found tons of great treasures.  My favorite finds were these two girls sweaters, they are made from a bulky thick/thin yarn with a hint of metallic running through them and I just had to get them.The pink one is from the Gap and the blue one is from K-mart.  If you are going to unravel sweaters I recommend that you use high quality sweaters, the pink came apart much easier and I was able to reclaim about 95% of the yarn.  The blue one involved a lot of cussing and I only got about 70% of the yarn and the yarn quality was not as good.I’m thinking that I have enough to make a couple of hats from each color, but I guess we’ll see.  The process of unraveling the sweaters took an evening.  I worked on it while I talked on the phone and watched TV, so it went pretty fast.  I have one more sweater to unravel, a beautiful, cotton, bulky, chocolate brown sweater that I want to make into a bath mat, but I’m going to wait until I finish up some other projects.There were also plenty of fun novelty shirts to be had.I found this great handmade, vintage house dress too!  I remember this fabric from my childhood, not exactly sure where, but I want to say kitchen or bathroom curtains.

I’m taking a long weekend and getting ready for an entire day of crafting Saturday with my Lincoln Handmade Friends and some family time on Easter, have a super crafty weekend and I’ll see you next week!

Vintage Sewing Notions

I love vintage sewing notions, the packages are so interesting and colorful and the display prices are so cheap.  I also really like wooden spools of thread.   I have a small collection of vintage supplies and I plan on displaying them in a shadow box of some sort in the craft room.  Here is a sample of my collection, the needle book on the bottom is one of my favorites and I also like the snaps and hooks and eyes cards, especially since they are missing some and not in perfect condition.It is surprisingly easy to find vintage supplies (not in mint condition)and most of mine have been found at yard sales or in “grab bags” from thrift stores.  I also got a nice selection out of the sewing cabinet that I purchased this fall.  The only thing I haven’t had much luck finding is decorative buttons on their original cards, but I do have several nice loose vintage buttons.

I got this box at a yard sale, some of the vintage quilt fabrics/squares inside will become part of the background for my collection, I might even try to incorporate the box, it’s really interesting.I also finished my amigurumi dolls from yesterdays post, aren’t they cute!  I definitely need an army of these with a few ninjas thrown in.

I ended up making all new hair for both of them and adding weight to their bottoms so they could stand on their own.  I think I may need to embellish the hair on the right one a little more with some bows or French knots or something.

BTW, If you have any super ideas how to display my vintage notions be sure to share by leaving a comment.  My collection has been hidden in a box for to long and I’m ready to get it out and on display.

Sewing Adventures and Mishaps

I really love to sew and I have really acquired quite a pattern collection that is always growing thanks to $.99 pattern sales.  I recently fell in love with Butterick 5329.

It is a really cute caftan style dress or top and I thought it would camouflage some of my middle “trouble spots”.  The pattern itself is very interesting and the pieces are all unusually shaped.  I was a little annoyed that the pattern pieces had to be cut one at a time, as opposed to folding the fabric in half and cutting two at a time.  It takes a large amount of concentration to keep from cutting two left sleeves, if you know what I mean. 

The instructions were great and it went together easily, I made view B, the knee length dress.  When I got to the point of trying it on I was a little disappointed, it is not as flattering as I had hoped and view B was a very bad choice.  I cut it down to tunic length and that helped a little.  Sadly it seems to make me even fuller through the middle.  It is very comfortable though. 

Surprisingly it looks better on me than it does on Boobzilla (my duct tape dummy).  I think it would be a super cute maternity top, but I don’t know how much wear I’ll get out of it, we’ll see, maybe it will grow on me.  I asked my husband, should I wear this or find something else and after a long pause he said I should find something else, so it’s not just me.  It is a nice pattern and the problem is my figure is not the meant for this design, so if you’re super skinny or need a cute maternity top this one’s for you!

I also had a bit of luck at a yard sale this Saturday, I bought a vintage sewing machine in a wood cabinet for $5.00, the sewing machine doesn’t work, but I was really interested in the cabinet.  Oh, and the cabinet was full of vintage sewing notions and wooden spools!

I have removed the machine from the cabinet and now my sewing machine has a new home, it’s too big to fit into the cabinet, but I don’t care, it can sit on top.  I also found the instruction manual and a box full of different feet for the machine, I think I’ll put it on Craig’s list.  I also have a good collection of vintage notions to make a shadow box with.  It was such a great find, I can’t stop talking about it!!!