Karla's Cottage

Say hello to my little friend

Last week, I found a toddler mannequin at a thrift store and thought it might make a good jewelry display.

What I liked about it most, was that it was padded.  All of my other mannequins or dress forms are too solid to stick pins into easily.  This little guy is an ideal pin cushion, she is very soft and poofy.  So I can hang jewelry onto her with some pearl topped pins.

Her arms are adjustable, so I left gaps in the fabric at the shoulder.  That way, I can manipulate the arms without the glued on pieces popping loose.

In some positions, she looked slightly creepy, but I think that with the bends made this way, she seems fine.  I had the appendages out at different angles and there was a distinct zombie or ghost vibe.

Hopefully, the pretty things I have glued onto her lend to a more happy vibe.

I used “The Good Stuff” to create the design.

 I think I’ll like using it for a display, I’ve tried so many different jewelry options, but keep scrambling to find just the right thing.  

And for what I paid for her, I’m pretty pleased, especially after looking these guys up online. 

Now, I need to make more jewelry to fill it up!

 

$1 garage sale tree makeover

Here is an after close up of a tree I found this summer at a garage sale.  I started with the after, because the before was so ugly, I might have lost your attention.  

It was definitely in the “walk on by” category of garage sale finds.

Here it is in all of its glory.  But if you look closely, there is potential.

Those are little vintage shiny brites that were used on the original creation.  And the tiny, wooden train isn’t that bad. There was a salvage pile, a toss pile, and a package up and sell at the mall pile.  
I also cut off all the non working lights.

The next step in this glow up was white spray paint for a flocked look.  I painted the board it sits on too.  After the paint dried, I carefully spritzed it with spray adhesive and generously sprinkled mica on it.  After it dried, I shook it upside down to get out the loose flakes.

Then, it was time for the fun stuff.  Batting was wrapped around the tree to create snow as well as something to glue deer hooves into.  I cut some sticks from my yard and made trees from them, plus added some bottle brush trees.  

The wood itself wouldn’t have been easy to attach anything to.  By using the batting, I was able to give the skinny legs of the deer and the twigs a better base for glue.  I also tried to cluster them, so I could glue everything to each other for even more stability.

Keep in mind, for any glue project, the surface you attach something to is only as good as what you attach that to.  For instance, if I hadn’t really, really, really glued the batting to the wooden circle really, really good, it wouldn’t matter how much glue I used on the deer and trees.  If the batting came up, they’d fall off.  

So, there was plenty of glue underneath it all too.  And lots oozing about here and there.  I gave it a coat of mica flakes to hide that mess.

The gold and silver packages got reused, and tied up with brown string with little, vintage bells.

There are birds and pinecones in the branches.

And a star on top.  

I like it so much better now.

This tree will probably be at the Good Juju sale today, I still haven’t decided if I’m selling or keeping.

There is an extra sale date for this weekend!  A party on Thursday night.

Then our regular dates of First Friday and Saturday.

Dollar Store Santa Hat Redo

This hat is from Dollar Tree, and while I am a huge Disney Fan, it isn’t exactly the look I wanted for the holidays.  Typically, I’ll glue a couple flowers onto a red, furry hat or some antler headbands, because you know, Christmas fashion is important, right?

But this year I was inspired by a falling apart, vintage, white mink stole I came across.  And of course, the first thing I thought was- “This must go on my Santa Hat!” (I have also been using bits of it on some Sugarplum Fairies that I made)

The fabric on this pink hat is pretty thin, so I snipped off the white band instead of adding to it.  I was worried that the weight of the fur would make the existing trim droop.

Since I detest sewing, and how do you sew through a pelt anyways,  I used Fabric Tac to add my fur trim.  First, I put a piece of cardboard covered in plastic inside the cap so the glue didn’t adhere the front to the back.  

 I trimmed the fur into pieces to fit around the hat and glued them down, using clothespins to hold them in place.

The adhesive made it just a little stiffer than I might have liked.  The Ultimate glue dries nicer, but I didn’t know if that would hold.  I wish I’d tried that first.  But this is okay, just not great.

 I added  velvet petals from an old rose I pulled off a vintage hat and centered an Angel in them.

Before attaching the fur, I buffed the edges really good with my fingers to get off any bits of fluff that might have come loose while cutting into it.  I sure don’t want tickley pieces landing on my nose while wearing it.  It doesn’t seem to be shedding, so I think it’s good.

The original pom pom got cut off and I half assed made one from folded fur, glued together and adhered to the tip of the hat by wrapping gluey ribbon around it tightly.

I might add some bling or more flowers after I try out wearing it, first I want to make sure it isn’t heavy or uncomfortable.  I wish I could find a velvet hat to redo, I’d prefer that, but since I do not want to sew, or to spend much, this on is just fine.  I’ll enjoy it!

More mini makeovers

My garage sale days have provided soooo many redos lately.  These mini pumpkins and gourds got a coat of glitter and paint.

They started out gray.  And free.  I’ll take free, ugly gourds any day.  The jewelry stand was $1 and also on the ugly side.
 Or just tacky?

Ta dah!  A quick makeover, because paint is just plain magic, isn’t it?

I thought of adding a layer of decopauged lace onto the torso, but then worried that it could snag any jewelry hung on the piece.  So, I’ll leave it as is and am happy with the look.

Dolly do-overs

The Halloween witches and zombies that I showed you previously started out with a bag of old dolls.  I sorted them into categories-

• beyond repair became zombies
• sorta bad shape, witches (if the skin was messed up, I repainted them green like Elphaba)
• decent shape, but needed work, angels

It is not even Halloween yet, but I zipped through my ghoulish gals in time to take into Good Juju’s September and October sales am now sparkling up some angelic babies for the November First Friday.

This one is actually a tree topper from the 60s.  Her base is a cone to fit on a Christmas tree.  I reused her wings on the smaller girl and made new ones for her from curled feathers.  Both had their hair replaced with wool roving.

My pal Tami invited us over for a craft day and offered styrofoam pumpkins to make over (mine is covered in lace) and tart tin dolls for the projects. I also whipped up my two angels and a few lil schroomies.

She went to a lot of trouble with her sleepy eyed doll.  It required sawing it in half, and gluing in a cork that was also cut in half to the doll could be put back together with the tin in the center.  

The tin makes a cute skirt top, doesn’t it?  Thanks, Tami, for the fun day filled with lovely projects!

My year of embracing orange and a redo-rescue

For the first autumn of my adult life, I’ve been drawn to fall colors.  It kind of coincides with my attraction to the mix of warm woods that I’ve now blended in my house along with the existing whites and creams.

 For decades if was just the whites.  But I sure am enjoying the wood textures we have added.  Also the dark leather chairs by the stone hearth.

Did it start with this dining table?  Maybe.  I’ve added quite a few touches of wood around our house since.

The hutch is painted white, but has a natural top.  This has been my new, go to move.  There are a few pieces with this paint on the bottom, wood stain on the top look in the last few years.

But orange?  That is brand new for me.  And I like the pops of brightness that color brings to the season.

For a while now, I have loved red accents on a white background at Christmas.  Having a neutral background means  that I can switch things up lot lot with just a few changes of color splashed around the room.

This over blown monstrosity was at a garage sale for one dollar, and typically, I’d have walked right by it.  Or paused to wonder how the basket would look spray painted white (probably very nice, filled with roses).

It is actually a very nice shape and looked good with a pot of mums as is.

Instead, I decided to accept the orange and see what I could do with it.

It had a lot of big, velvet pumpkins inside, two I added to the urns in the top pic.  The rest I set aside along with about 50% of the crazy, over the top amount amount of leaves and berries and bows.

The abundance was pared down to a more reasonable amount in the basket, and I still have a lifetime supply of leaf and berry picks to use for something else.  

So that makes three more palatable arrangements and a leftover bag of supplies for $1, plus the 50 cents each I paid for the urns at the same garage sale.  

Plus, plenty of stems leftover to fill this caldron (also from a garage sale).

All filled with my new enjoyment of autumn tones.  I won’t be changing over my entire decor to pumpkin colors, but I am liking the hints and peeks of them I have scattered around.

 

 

Adding real estate to an antique mall booth, things are looking up!

Well, it didn’t take me long to become infatuated with the antiquing world after a few years off.  I haven’t had booth space since 2009, or so, besides a few pop up Birdsong shops in my garage, and when I quit, it took me years to get over the itch to buy junk to redo and repurpose.  I very much loved the business.

Over time, I got out of the habit of getting up early every weekend for garage sales and stopped yearning for ugly little tables to transform into cuties and even started clearing my house and storage out.  Goodwill, friends, and family got all of my back stock when I cleaned out.

My friends still had spaces and sometimes I’d get my redo fix by helping them paint something or redecorate a booth.  Finally, I gave in and joined them full time by taking on a wall at Good Juju at the Old West Bottoms.  I was very, very worried about finding enough to fill it, since I’d gotten myself down to bare bones and had nothing to bring in.  But a couple months of very hard work and hunting built my stash up enough that now, I’m taking on a second wall.

 It is also thanks to Beth, as my first wall was.  She had a bit more space than she needed, and offered to share.  We’ve been partners in the past, and mesh well together, plus have lots of giggle fits and fun while doing it.

When I painted my original wall, I also painted a couple for her, and this is one of them. Here is how it looked when I took it over this week.

I like the color I’d chosen for it, so that worked out well for me.  But I wanted it completed, without spending any money, so had my dear, helpful husband come in with me to add a shutter over the vertical missing plywood, and I covered poster board in heavy vintage wallpaper to cover the horizontal hole.  It wasn’t quite enough, so we patched with a piece of ceiling tin and then a strip of leftover trim to finish it off.

Did I mention that my husband has been soooooooo supportive and sweet?

He also hung 3 chandeliers, put in a French door, hung a vintage window over my wall, and then made a shelf from hinged shutters.

The shutter shelf looked so good, I texted Beth to see if she wanted one on her wall too.  So he put one up from a pile of shutters she had, and it immediately split and all the slats spilled out. 

oops

But, I mentioned she had quite a few, right?  So he pulled out heavier duty ones and switched them out.  I’m glad it all worked, because they add so much to the space.  For one thing, it extends our real estate, and we are making the best use of the area.  For another, it just plain old looks good, and hopefully will bring people in.

With having this area to fill too, we are making the most of these tall walls and grabbing more spots to sell from.

Juju is such a cool place, people always come in, and there are so many dealers very talented with styling and design, so it’ll be nice if we can grab a little more attention.  Beth has amazing finds and a great eye, so already has her regulars, but I could use a few of my own.

I know that poster board isn’t a very durable way to build a wall, unless maybe you are the 4th little pig and were left out of the story because it is even dumber than straw.  But it was efficient and looks fine. I can change it any time I want, pretty quickly.  But, so little of it shows, I probably won’t bother.

The French doors were some I used in the studio at home, and I also had the wallpaper (of course) but struggled to figure out a quick, cheap way to get it up over the hole in the wall.  Then, I noticed that I had pieces of poster board on my table at my work space, and thought I’d try using that, by glueing the paper to it and stapling it to the boards. 

It seems fine.  We will see if it holds up.  

Now that I have committed to more space, I am slightly freaked out.  Honestly, I love the venue, hanging with my pals, and decorating the space, but I do worry about the time and commitment of keeping the space filled throughout the winter when there are no garage sales.  I hope to be able to make jewelry and some other creations, not just hunt and gather. 

Please wish me luck.  I think I could use a bit of my own good juju.

 

 

 

Sometimes a short cut repair is better than nothing

Our chicken coop/storage shed/cat dwelling sure was (and actually, still is) in bad shape.

Very

Bad

Shape

But with a few sheets of siding and less than two cans of paint, at least it isn’t an eyesore like it was.

Here it is as we got started. My husband had already began adding the siding to the bottom on the left before I remembered to get a photo.  He also emptied it out.

Yep, he did a clean up on the inside too!  That man is a keeper. (Unlike some of the spider webby piles of hoarded junk we found inside)

We know that the correct way to repair this structure would have been to pull all the siding off. It’s rotting.  But- so is the rest of the building and we aren’t ready to tear it all down and rebuild.  It’s still functional for what we needed.

What we did instead was cover up the worst part and paint the rest.  

Paint is magic.

After adding a slice of siding over the bottom, we thought a strip of trim would help it look more intentional instead of just bandaged.

Rich also trimmed off the most ragged of the ends of the roof boards and I painted over them too.  

See how bad they were to start with?  Also, years ago when I used this shed as an antique store, I’d painted vines around the entry, added cute aqua shutters, and a barn door as a canopy over the entry.  Well most of it rotted away with time, but those vines were still hanging in.  I’d used oil based paint, which is why I think it held up so well.  

To paint over them, I’d need to prime, but I still kind of liked them and the history of adding them, so instead, I got a small brush and painted around the leaves.

Same with the metal peacocks.  They had hung on that building for 30 years, from way back when we used to raise peafowl.  I had to leave those, they were history.

It isn’t done right, but it’s done good enough.  Sometimes you gotta just slap some lipstick on a pig and get on with things, right?  It’s better than it was. And at under $250 for the clean up, as opposed to the cost of demolition and rebuilding? 

I’m pretty happy with the cosmetic improvements.  This pig is much cuter with make up.

 

 

 

I’m proud of my boy

What a cool old barn!  It’s an event center and my talented boy has been doing the carpentry there on the remodel.

But should it just be called carpentry?  How about wood artistry?

Especially this pedestal sink!

It started as a stump, and he burnt out the center.

So that there was a hollow for the plumbing.  And isn’t the trim on the bottom cool!?

And look at how he incorporated the twisty vines on this shelving.

This is such a creative space, and I’d love to walk through and admire the details.  

I’m sure he doesn’t send me photos of all of it, but I really appreciate the ones I get.

It’s hard having part of my heart living so far away, but seeing what he is doing and knowing that he has found a place where he can use both his creative and wood working skill talents eases the pain.  I’m so proud of him.

 

 

 

 

 

A redo at Juju

 
I have been busy.  Way busy.

My upstairs spot at Good Juju was not quite the right fit for me.  Plus, my friends were downstairs and I wanted to be near them.  Beth offered to share, but I am not ready for a big space, so she offered me a sixth of her big area and that was just ideal! And she let me do some remodeling while she was on vacation.

She also got some solid walls added. Our friend, Sam, covered bare 2x4s with paneling so I could paint them, and I used some of the leftover colors to paint the back of this display too.

The new walls are neutral shades of blue, green and grey.  On the back wall, to cover an old garage door, we hung a 9x12 canvas and way up high, added some homemade grapevine wreaths.  I covered the table this hutch sits on with a burlap skirt and added a strip cut from a lace curtain across it so the bright light bulbs don’t bother anyone’s eyes with their glare.

Beth also offered to share this spot, it is her craft supply corner, and I added a few tidbits to the display after setting it up.

Here is Sam, hard at work, making the walls. They really add a lot to the area.

Here is a before, or I guess, a during shot.  With Sam building wall to the right, and my darling husband building a shelf/porch awning for my wall to the left.

In the back, you can see the before of the garage door wall.

This is a close up.  It looks a little sad here, but Beth is so good with displaying her great finds, that honestly, you didn’t even notice it before.  Still, I’m pretty happy with the streamlined look that the canvas drop cloth gave the room.  It was $10, and simply nailed to the wall above the garage door windows.  But, it let light shine in weirdly.  So I had to go behind it and nail cardboard over the panes of glass.

Here it is with fresh paint, back wall covered, wreaths in place, and a picket fence hung from the ceiling to cover some grids.

The wreaths are huge!  Sugarwings and Rich pulled the vines down from trees in our woods, and we wrangled them into shape together.  It was harder to do than you’d think, you really need to man handle those thick vines to convince them they want to be in a circle.

After the thickest pieces were twisted into each other, we secured them with a bit of wire.  Then, I started weaving smaller pieces in and out to fill in.  I don’t know if you can tell just how big these (very heavy) guys are, but the largest is about 4’tall.

Here is another in progress photo, before the wreaths and picket fence. My wall is gray.

And I am sooooo happy with how it turned out!  The porch columns give it a sense of structure, so I feel like I have a real spot of my own, not just a wall.  And the door on the front will give me space to hang jewelry that I have made.  

And the shelf!!!  

So much can fit onto that wonderful shelf!  If you don’t have much square footage, go UP.  Use the air space, right?

Here is a cleaned, but not finished pic of the spot.  Beth and I were going to work on it after her trip, but she got sick.  So Angie, our delightful neighbor, helped move furniture with me, and I rearranged things as much as I could.  Beth will bring in more before the sale and add to it quite a bit.

I had told myself  that I wouldn’t set up too much of her area, but hey- that’s the fun part!

So, I am guilty of doing a few displays… with the knowledge that she will probably remake them when she comes back.  But on the other hand, this way, she doesn’t have any pressure to come in if she isn’t up to it.  It’s okay as is, if she needs more time.

My wall needs more work, there are changes I want to make.  I’ve kept a black tub underneath the table for storage, and the lace on it stands out to much.  I need a plain, dark cloth over it so it disappears.  And I probably have too much hanging from the shelf.  It went from full to cluttered. 

For now, I’m headed to Florida for a rare, springtime sister trip.  My plan is to rest my poor head and recover from this concussion.  My doctor says I have been over doing it and while I hate to admit that, I agree.  I have felt awful throughout this whole escapade and look forward to a quiet week with dark glasses on to rest up.