Handmade

Not everything in my new room (see recent posts) is recycled trash. I am lucky enough to own a collection of our own Auntie Bucksnort's pieces. My sister does beautiful, delicate, detailed and creative art and I treasure each piece of her work that I have in my house. My new shabby chic room is graced by this wonderful stained glass fan lamp that she made many years ago. 

I am pleased to finally have the fan lamp in the same room as her oval piece that is hanging in the window. They complement each other beautifully, although conceived and executed years apart. 

Here is a detail from the embroidered pillowcases in the room that I made some years ago, after living in New Mexico for the first time had liberated my sense of appropriate color combinations. My approach to handwork is more or less pretty slapdash--just get it done. Obviously, I'm not the artist sister with all the patience and attention to detail!

Still Recycling

I just can't stop with this trash talk. I wanted to show you one last garbage vignette in my "new" room. This time it is another little shelf thingy that my sister crawled out onto the burn pile to rescue. It spent some time in my New Hampshire basement feeling rejected, but made the cut and was loaded into the moving van when we headed west to New Mexico. 

Good thing, too! Old New England trash like this is considered "antique" out here in the New West, and is hard to find. So, the battered little shelf became shabby chic and ended up as part of a proud display. 

That lusterware plate below the shelf came from--you guessed it--the Swap Shop in my old town in New Hampshire, where I found it down at the bottom of a pile of cracked plates in the kitchen recycling section. Ditto the two little floral plates in the top photo.

That bit of hand work casting the lacy shadow (below) was also someone's discard.

The little ceramic animals were collected when I lived in Canada many years ago. They were made at the Wade Pottery in Burslem, England, and used to be found as premiums in boxes of Red Rose Tea Bags. 

The old bottles and the little creamer were dug out of the ancient dump behind the stone wall at our old colonial home back east. Every spring, we would find different items near the surface, moved there by the frosts of winter--in much the same way that New England farmers and gardeners have a new "crop" of stones every season.

Other People's Trash

Now that I've started talking about frugality, it's going to be hard to stop me. I wanted to show you some more uses for other people's garbage. We're still in my redecorated bedroom. 

The little cupboard in the top photo was found up in the hayloft of the barn at our old colonial house in New Hampshire. It was painted black when I found it and has been through several paint jobs since then. In this particular reincarnation it is decorated with some sunbonnet baby stickers that my sister gave me long ago. 

The shelves hold some glass pieces that mostly came from the Swap Shop at our old New Hampshire dump. The "Swap," as we lovingly called it, was a metal building containing shelving that was loosely organized into categories like "books" and "toys" and "kitchen," etc. The motto there was "take it or leave it" and it was a great way for the community to recycle objects they didn't want that were still useful. Sadly, the town there has apparently become too upscale for this kind of recycling, and the Swap is no longer in existence. 

Some of my best finds at the Swap were these two old glass candy holders. They would have originally been sold filled with candy, held in by a paper seal at the bottom. 

The cupboard is sitting on an old painted wooden chest that was found in the back hall of the same old colonial house when we first moved in. Apparently, even the feckless "B" family had no use for it. It, too, has lived through several refurbishings at my hands, and is now a creamy but battered yellow. 

The cloth spread on top of the chest is woven of fine linen, delicately decorated with drawn-thread work. It was found, balled up in the bottom of a box of assorted trash, down at my favorite New Hampshire dump--an absolute treasure, just tossed away. 

Frugality is Back, and Not a Moment Too Soon

All recycled: The floor lamp, chair, bedside chest, shelf, candy dish, dresser scarf

I've always been frugal. There, now you know. Maybe it's because I was born a Yankee, but when I first read or heard the phrase use it up or wear it out, make it do or do without, it was with a great feeling of recognition and relief. So that was what was wrong with me, and why I never liked shopping.

Nothing makes me happier than using someone else's castoffs. I guess you might find that scary, but it certainly means that I am easily entertained. 

Take a look at these photos from the room that I recently painted and redecorated. Practically everything in the room was someone else's trash that has found a new life. The old metal bedstead was left behind by the occupants in a house I bought long ago. The floor lamp in the top photo and the table lamp in the bottom one came from the Swap Shop at our dump/recycling center in New Hampshire, as did the lace curtains, the picture frame, the candy dish (don't know what else to call it--it has a pressed glass bottom, divided into sections, and a carved aluminum lid), and the dresser scarf (hand-painted). The little shelf unit on the wall was probably fished out of the burn pile by my sister, and some of the glass items on it came from an ancient dump out by the stone wall of our old center chimney colonial house, also in New Hampshire.  

The wing chair was always mine but could have been tossed out when a puppy ate the upholstery off twenty years ago. I've made set after set of slipcovers for it since then. 

See how much fun I'm having?

Spring Cleaning, My Way

I keep a relatively neat house, but I only like to clean the middles of rooms, so it's a good thing that spring is here at last. I guess I really do a sort of spring cleaning, but the only way I can get it accomplished is by painting. I pull everything out of the room, paint the walls, and only put clean things back in. It works for me.

I should have taken "before" photos of this room. It was painted lavender--not a color I'm fond of--by the former owners and it had some poorly executed stencils of butterflies along the top of the wall. I used to keep the door shut so I wouldn't have to look at it. Now, with its nice fresh map-water blue paint and shabby chic decor (lace, quilts, painted furniture, lots of recycled stuff) pulled together from things I had here and there, it's my favorite room. 

Miss Emma likes it, too, as you can see. She insisted on posing for you.