Organizing My Craft Room!

Yep, its Makeover Monday again, and I am involved in possibly my biggest makeover ever.

 If you have been following my blog this past week you know that I am moving my craft room from the basement furnace room to one of my former guest rooms.

It has been like a jigsaw puzzle to put the shelving together in a way that fits and maximizes storage.  To the left you see the hodpodge, though neatly placed and various cubbies and drawer sets, the variety of materials and colors makes the storage units sort of visually fight with each other.  I decided to unify them using color and theme.

I painted the antique sewing machine drawers white, and then painted the fronts of the gold cubby a cream color.  I do think this helped somewhat.  Next I tackled the theme part.  I had already reverse decopauged the pair of birds on the school cabinet, and since birds are sort of the theme of the room, I found these rows and rows of birds on Graphic Fairy to add charm to the set of shallow storage drawers.

I also made a pennant banner out of more of the quilt that I used for the header on the windows across the room from them.  I still need to finish collecting jars to fill the shelves shown here, and then paint the lids and label them.  But then again, that is a project for another day.

The local quilt guild came by for a home tour last weekend, and I got a lot of compliments on my craft room and how well organized it looks.  If only they knew, I still have so, so much to do to get it so that I can lay my hand on any item I need.  At least that is the goal. 

 Thanks for coming by.

Polishing Silver

For My Style Saturday I wanted to share one of my favorite gifts, maybe ever!!  My daughter gave me a card for Mother's Day saying she would polish my everyday silver plate flatware.  I told her that would be a lot of work, and thanked her for the thought. 

I came down Thursday morning to my knives drying on a towel.  Then when I came down to eat my cereal Friday morning all the spoons were gone.  Fortunately there was one in with the forks so I could eat.  :-)  They were back, drying on the same towel an hour later.

Friday night she returned the forks she had taken after returnnig the spoons and took the soup spoons and serving pieces.  She was back in a couple of hours.  As you can see I have a lot of flatware.  Wasn't this a lovely gift?  She does live in our basement apartment with her husband and baby, which made it easier, I guess.  She said she polished it all while watching TV and it made her feel more productive.  What a darling girl. 

Thanks Molly!

Antique Group Photo Grouping!

For my Friday Favorite this week, I wanted to share my new photo wall.  The middle, long photo is what inspired this arrangement.  It is a graduating class, with all the girls dressed in white and I love it.   After getting a good deal on it, from another dealer at the mall, about $30, I thought it would be fun to collect more, and display them together above the batten board wall in my family room.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Until I checked out ebay and found that long group photos from the turn of the last century usually sell for a hundred or two and more.  Rethinking my plan, I decided to have some small antique photo cards, that I found for less than $10 each at the antique mall, enlarged, as I have had good luck with doing that, because old photo originals have such good resolution.  I actually took them and had them color copied (to pick up the sepia tone) onto photo cardstock for just $1.50 each.  I then found old frames in my collection in the basement and spent some time framing them.   I even included this favorite photo of women dancing together in a stream that I got from Graphics Fairy, and which I have used several times.  Such a joyful photo.  Which brings me to one reason I love old group photos.  They ask so many questions, "Who are we?", "What is the occasion?", "Why am I smiling, while she looks angry?"  "Why are we holding up our dresses while we dance in a stream?"  They just capture my imagination.

But in the case of a couple of the pictures, I know who they are and what they are doing, because they are family pictures.  To the right is a picture of my mother (in the cap) with the other girls who also worked the switch board at the newspaper where she worked, she was 17 in this picture.

I also happened to have a photo of my father and his polo team in College.  Since my parents met when she was in high school and he was just out of college, I like to imagine that this is just how they looked when they met, the tall blond Norwegian whose mother was from the old country and the small brunette who had a Native American princess in her ancestral lines.  (Can you tell I love family history?) 

Thanks for coming along to see how my grand idea was humbled a bit, but actually happened.  I am super very happy with how it turned out and I am especially happy it didn't cost me $1,000.