what a steal!

100% cashmere sweater.  Perfect size.  $3.  Really.  Man, I love thrift shopping.

yay crafting!

Dressers for all!

Ok...got some pictures of the goodies I got last weekend.  I'll split it up into multiple posts, since it would make an enormous post to do it all at once.

First, everyone has a new chest of drawers.  Our closet is really not a closet at all but a set of stairs that gives access to the attic (at the top of which is a door lying on ceiling...trippy!).  There is a hanging bar that goes across just inside the door at the bottom, but it's really not much hanging space, so we needed more drawer space.  I really want a wardrobe, and I found a beautiful antique one, but I'm not sure I want to send the money on it when it needs to have the hanging bar made lengthwise instead of widthwise.  But, man, it was a neat piece.  The only place I've been able to find wardrobes is at IKEA, but they are all very modern in style and would clash with our dressers...not to mention the fact that I don't want another particle board piece of furniture.

The boys were sharing a dresser, but between school clothes, socks, undies, jammies, and play clothes, the drawers were running over.  So now each boy has a dresser.

The baby had a dresser in her room, but it was a changing table/dresser combo, and two of the four drawers would fall out when you pull them out to put clothes in them.  She's outgrown the changing table portion of it, so she really needed a dresser with more space, and I was tired of catching the drawers each time I put clothes away.  I've gone through and cleaned out her room for the most part, and all of my craft stuff is now in bins or on shelves.  I used my labelmaker and labeled all the bins (except the big ones), so I know what's in them (even though they are clear...I still need the extra prompt).  The only things left to do in her room are to hang the shelf that our Boyd's bears collection will rest on, clean the diaper stuff out of her closet and store her other cloth diaper stuff in the attic (in the chaos that has been our life lately, I haven't kept up with cloth diapering like I had intended to, and I'm hoping she'll potty train soon), and get her a ceiling fan.  Currently there is one single can light, and given the location of her room, she really needs a fan, as her room is on the southeast corner of the house and gets plenty of sun.

The bears on her dresser are tea-dyed bears that came from a garage sale of one of my MIL's friends.  They have such personality!  The lamp is another vintage hurricane lamp that I found at the secondhand store.  Both top and bottom light up, and I love the flower detail on the body of the lamp.

I also found a day bed for Roo's room at the second hand store that has a trundle underneath that expands to be about the same height as the daybed for when guests come.  My grandma on my dad's side is a wonderful portrait artist, and she did a painting of a couple of girls dressed as princesses blowing bubbles, and I've always loved this painting.  My mom let me have it not long before we moved, and I've been wanting to hang it in her room since.  It really needs to be framed, but I couldn't wait any longer to put it up.

wooly bears

Fall is upon us.  The wooly bears have invaded, which is a sure sign that the weather is about to get cooler.  I'm really not ready for it.  It seems that this spring and summer just flew past with all that we had going on.  First it was getting ready for the spring auction (and I didn't make anything :( ), then it was birth stuff on and off all May, June was all about getting ready and going to Germany, July was getting caught up on painting that really needed to be done and then my great-grandfather passing away, August was about Liam's birthday and going back to Indiana to bring home some of my great-grandmother's things and then getting the kids ready to go back to school, and so far September has been all about surviving getting my LSAT teaching prep done.  To say I miss having my old rhythm would be an understatement.  I haven't done any crafting in months, partly due to the fact that it was all in boxes and not accessible in the disaster of Miss C's room and partly due to the lack of time.  I didn't feel comfortable taking the time to sit and craft when there were rooms to clean, things to organize, stuff to purge.

Things feel like they are a little closer to coming together.  I've decided that this is a process that will never feel finished, but at least I'm almost to the point where I can feel like I can do something other than obsess about what needs to be done on the house.  I'll be posting a room by room synopsis of what has been done and where we're going with things over the next little bit.

I've learned a little about the things I really like in terms of style, and I've also learned that I've inherited the second-hand bug from my dad's side of the family.  In addition to the wonderful vintage goodies I brought home from Indiana, I've been picking up some here and there at the second hand store.  I'll have to share those with you too.  I've realized that I really like vintage, which I guess makes sense considering some of my favorite bloggers do too.

Anyway, I miss posting about what's been going on with all of us, and hopefully you've missed reading about it.

Oh, so the title is wooly bears...guess I should share about them?  I've always been a caterpillar kind of girl.  Loved the wooly bears when I was a kid, and I can remember ending up with itches in the webs of my fingers from spending so much time picking them up, holding them, petting them, and making them my wiggly little playmates.  So imagine my delight when while weeding yesterday I found a few of them curled up in the tall grass.  I wanted to share my excitement with the boys, so I gave a holler for them.  Jonah was Johnny-on-the-spot and couldn't get a hold of one fast enough.  He carried it around, petted it, and took it in to show Daddie (who promptly hollered for him to take it out, which is how I knew it ended up in the house in the first place!).  So now my little J-man is a wooly bear guy too.  Miss C. couldn't be bothered to touch one, as she was a little afraid of the fact that they move when you do.  Liam thought they were neat but didn't think he liked the tickly feeling he got when they moved.  Jonah, however, couldn't get enough.  Since yesterday, he's been on the lookout.