Indulge Your Shelf

"...and this year, it will be the first day of the rest of our lives..." That's what our wedding reception invites said, because on June 21, 1991, I married my sweetheart, Dennis. Happy anniversary, Dennis!  I hope we get to have 20 more years together! If you haven't already entered my 600 posts/300 followers celebration giveaway, details are here !

I *so* enjoyed participating in Michelle Geller's Little Book Swap!  I had never done a little book before and I had to make 26 of them for this swap -- using one original that I created and then copied and assembled 26 times. Here's how my little book copy looked liked -- it's 8 pages, each one that I collaged and then used a quote from Emily Dickinson on "hope" for each page. Then I folded all 26 of them, and embellished each page with glitter pen, and... glued a tiny mother of pearl button on the front, and tied with two different colors of baker's twine! I included a little tag made just for the project, and packaged them prettily with a scrap of vintage wallpaper in a little plastic bag. I thought they looked very sweet, but when I received my 26 books in return I was wishing I'd done the packaging even more special ! ( SPOILER ALERT if you are in the swap and haven't received yours back yet!) Michelle's packaging is always perfectio...

This time, my flea market find actually came from a flea market, not a thrift store.  I went with a new friend to the local flea market for the first time this summer and  I was thrilled to find this guitar: It is for my son.  He's been teaching himself to play using YouTube videos, and doing quite well.  Because he plays the trumpet already, he knows how to read music.  He'd been using a guitar that we got free from Freecycle.org about 5 years ago, but it was literally falling apart, so I'd been actively looking for one for him at thrift stores lately.  Imagine my surprise when I saw this one at a flea market, new with the tags on it, with a case, for $50! You know, I didn't even try to talk the seller down because I thought it was such a great buy at that price.  (The ones I'd been seeing at thrift stores were made overseas and usually quite beaten up or missing some part, and cost the same or more!)  I was just thrilled to have the cash to ...

This weekend, I hope you enjoy celebrating your dad -- whether you have him to hold, or not. Dad and me, 1965 And, enjoy celebrating with your husband if he's a dad, too!  We did our celebrating yesterday, as Dennis works every Sunday.  I cooked a nice dinner and afterwards, Dennis and Ben went out to hit some practice balls in the yard. Practice is always helpful! I enjoyed just sitting and watching them as the balls were flying! Snoopy says, "I'm staying here!  It's scary out there!" I love Father's Day for Dennis -- we feel so happy and so lucky to have had the chance to be parents after all we went through! See -- Ben's jumping for joy!  I hope you have a lovely day, weekend, and celebration, too! Oh, and, if you haven't already entered my 600 posts/300 followers celebration giveaway, details are here !

I'm so pleased to be celebrating having more than 300 wonderful friends who visit this blog!  I'm also excited that I've posted more than 600 posts in the 2-1/2 or so years I've been blogging at Indulge Your Shelf!  To mark these milestones, I'm giving away something that so many of us antique lovers and paper arts fans love: an album full of ephemera! I created this album for one of you to enjoy. There's a pocket made from vintage fabric... decorated with a gorgeous vintage flower. Opposite it is an antique advertisement card; isn't that little girl precious? The page she is on is the front of slip-in pocket. The back of the pocket is decorated with a vintage silver doily and one of my tag creations... trimmed with seam binding, and decorated with a sewing pattern flower I made. Best of all,I'm including a selection of some of my favorite ephemera! You'll get vintage wallpaper... book pages... cool old papers...   some very special papers... like ...

Here are a couple of crafty things I've been working on the last few days: This is that cute Samsonite train case I got in Kansas. I covered it with some new, vintage-style paper... as well as some authentic old paper... some downloads from The Graphics Fairy ... and this new, old-looking sticker from my German "hometown", Koeln (Cologne.) Then, I finally put photos and some reminiscences into my Silver Bella journal! It was like HEAVEN playing with the beautiful pages that I received in the Silver Bella swap. Some of my favorite pages: this one, celebrating my 'fascinator' on hat night... and this one, showing off our blingy bracelets! Such wonderful memories! Yesterday I brought in a garden cart/plant stand that I had painted last summer, and decided to display it on top of my dining room table (!)  My son said, "Mom, why is the cart on the table?"  He didn't wait for an answer, though.  He knows me too well! I decorated it with some garden-themed ...