Pick a Poppy or Three

For your crafting pleasure - an image of three poppies from a piece of sheet music copyrighted 1898.  So the original image is out of copyright, and I am providing the cleaned up vector graphic version for free.

Original scan:

PNG (image) version of cleaned up copy:

And the svg (scalable vector graphics) version is here

ETA: added the appropriate CC licence:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

If you use this, show me what you did with it!

*blows dust off*
Well, I haven't posted here in a long time. I got a job, which seriously cut into my thrifting time. But I'm still a cheapskate and a hippie. Used is usually more interesting and always more environmentally beneficial as well.

My latest infatuation is with estate sales. Estate sales are like going to thrift stores, garage sales, antique stores and the best part of looking for houses, all rolled up into one.

Estate sales are always held in the house. I must confess that if it weren't perfectly evil, I would house hunt as a hobby. I love seeing different house styles, and even better if I can get a peek at someone's furniture and tchotkes. Estate sales you get that, and have a legitimate reason to be there. And you can go into houses that you could never convince a realtor to take you to... either because they are too expensive or way too cheap. Last week Bob and I went to a house in Dallas that's on the market for 1.5 million (and comes with its own mini-me dollhouse sized replica of the house).

 Besides, estate sales go on in rain, cold and heat, so the estate sale season is all year long, even holiday weekends.

 Oh, and I decided to see if I could make some sort of money with my estate sale-ing instead of doing the programming thing. And what do I know? I know crafting, at least from the 70's on. So now I'm seeing if I can make some money while I have fun checking out the estate sales.

If there's any craft you've ever wanted to do, check out my store - Breezy's Craft(y) Books - there's probably a book about how to do it. Or drop me a line, I'll probably know how to do it or be able to point you to the right spot.

I was looking for different options for a table cover for craft shows, so Bob and I went to Perth Street in Dallas. If you aren't familiar with this, it's a street that has about half a dozen stores that sell discount fabric.

I haven't been there since Mom and I went shopping for fabric. Sadly, my two favorite stores are long gone. That still left quite a few to check on. My third favorite store is still there (now it's my favorite, I guess). It has all of the gaudy prom dress fabrics and funky trims and I want everything they sell, but have no good use for any of it. There is only one upholstery store left. I think I nearly got in trouble when I found a wall of Minky and tried to crawl into it.

The rest of the places we looked were just as I remembered them. All sorts of different fabrics with no particular grouping to them, with the occasional really weird pattern to them.

The only problem I had (besides Bob's tolerance for just one more fabric store), was that none of these places are air conditioned, and I just don't handle heat anymore. I may have to go back into the fall when it's cooler. I did find a whole stack of 100 inch wide fabric @ $4 a yard, but I decided to think about it, then found a black sheet at a garage sale the next day.

Things that amuse me

One site I check regularly for grins and giggles and oddball shopping is Rene Bates auctions This site runs auctions for other places, mostly cities and similar municipal entities; it's based in McKinney so most of the auctions are in Texas, and many of them are local to this area.

Most of them at least attempt to group items in some sort of logical order. Then there's the Plano PD auction, which included this grouping

Portable Gazebo
Bag of bags and tools
Weed eater
Jack
Blower
Drill
Copper tubing
Baby stroller (Baby stroller ?!)

Why you should buy generics

Originally published at Mint Life, brought to you by way of Consumerist.com (BTW, I've never looked at mint.com, but if you are a consumer, you really should be reading consumerist.com)


Let's hope this doesn't blow your feed reader!

Oh look, it's the Arizona state police mascot.

So we went to one of my favorite rehash houses the other day - Thrift Town on 26 - and found the following:



In case you can't figure it out (it took me a minute, and I saw it IRL), this is a person wearing a sombrero, laying face down with his (her?) jeans, er, lets say they're half off, ok?

I can't quite figure out who demonstrated the worst taste...

The person who made the mold?
The person who made the figurine (I'll give this person a pass, she/he was probably a child)?
The person who donated this to ARC or whatever other charity picked this up?
Or the person who actually put this out on the floor?

A slightly different thrift store

I found out about this store today, do you need any office furniture?

http://thebenefitstore.blogspot.com/