A perfect storm of NERD

I originally thought this would be a crafts blog. This plan was derailed early on when I realized that I am, in fact, AWFUL at crafting. I'm impatient, messy, uncoordinated, and clumsy.

I still almost made this a crafts blog. Names I considered include:

DIY Reject
To What Has Daisy Glued Her Hand This Week?
Crafting for the Incompetent
"It Only Took 30 Minutes!" My Ass

Because regardless of my incompetence, I really like crafting. I like taking junky, unused stuff and turning it into something pretty and at least nominally useful. I love watching a crazy idea become greater than the sum of its parts. It's a visceral sense of accomplishment that adulthood doesn't often provide.

I'd been looking for cool geek shoes since I found these boots while trawling tumblr for Avengers info (Hot guys, Joss, and shit blowing up. Can I get in line now?). I din't like the execution (Sneakers should not have heels.), but I liked the theory. Apparently the universe wanted me to have geek kicks, because The Hairpin promptly linked to some badass decoupaged heels.

They looked easy enough (famous last words!), but I didn't have any comics, so my friend Kristen and I negotiated a trade: she'd brave the comic book store and send comics for herself and me, and I'd make shoes for her too. I ended up tackling her shoes first because, well, it turns out that in the comics Captain America doesn't look like this; he looks like a sack of potatoes wrapped in a flag. So I need to rethink my concept.

Anyway. Kristen sent me four Mass Effect comics. I know absolutely nothing about ME, but Mr. Razor is a fanboy and pointed out the cool stuff for me.



Shoe one was a near-disaster. Non-pro tip: If you've never decoupaged anything in your life, don't start with a curving, uneven, moveable surface. There were glued fingers, torn papers, and copious cursing.



Shoe two went a whole lot faster. Here's what I learned between the left pump and the right: choose large images. You'll have fewer edges and fewer weird tiny gaps. (Weird tiny gaps, however, are easily covered by onomatopoeia text.) Plus, big images show up better when people look down at the shoes on your feet. Cut the images as close to the shape of the shoe as you can to avoid creasing. Then resign yourself to some creasing at the heel anyway. That curve is freaking impossible.



Materials: Sensible pumps ($6 slightly used at Boomerangs), 4 comic books, mod podge, small paint brush, and acrylic sealer

Method: Cut out your pictures, slap some mod podge on those suckers, wait for them to get a little bit damp so they'll bend better to the shoe, then slap 'em on, When you have the whole thing covered, do 3 or 4 coats of mod podge over the shoes (waiting about a half an hour or more between coats), then wait a day and spray the sealer over them in a well-ventilated area.

Time: About an hour if you know what you're doing. Probably closer to three if you read this and are going, "What's mod podge?" But, as I think I've proved, still totally doable for a newbie!

Or, you know, you could send me some shoes and comics and I could do them for you for a nominal fee. Just sayin'.

American Picker

Hey, look what I found in the trash!


Well, sort of. It was sitting on the sidewalk across the street with the trash, but I choose to believe the fact that it wasn't in a trash bag was a sign that whoever put it out there wanted someone to adopt it and love it.



I thought it was a hat box and was going to use it to store some of Baby Razor's increasingly out of control toy collection, but no: it's a vintage American Tourister hard-shell suitcase, exactly like this one on sale at Etsy. It's a little dirty, and the inside smells like grandma, but I think I can clean it up and use it for something cool. Heck, I can even use it as god intended: as the world's most badass carry-on.


I almost didn't grab it. Partly because, while I am an experienced curb shopper, it feels weird to do it in suburbia where everyone can look out their window and see you taking someone else's trash. And partly because I now have a nagging voice in the back of my head going beeeeeeedbuuuuuuuugs. Stupid bedbugs.

But my armchair is next to the front window, and the suitcase was right in my line of vision this morning, calling to me. You know they crush garbage, right? it said. I'm just saying. That'll be on you. Yeah, for some reason vintage luggage sounds a lot like my mother.

Why was it out there? Well, there have been a lot of people stopping by the house across the street this week, poking around and cleaning, so I'm choosing to believe that the elderly woman who lived there went to an assisted living facility. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.


So, does anyone have tips on getting old-lady smell out of fabric? Or cleaning hard luggage (I'm guessing just scrub the crap out of it with soap & water. It looks built to withstand a nuclear bomb, after all.) And can anyone tell me what this mark, to the right of the American Tourister logo, is:

Monogram? Business name? Other?

Thrift Shop Buy of the Week

For Melanie at BBCAmericanGirl, pictures of the vintage Liberty of London silk scarf I got for $1 today at Boomerangs. I'd love to get an idea of how old it is, if any of you might know.

Self-Promotion

I'm working today in an actual office. On the one hand, there is no natural light; but on the other, nobody has pooped their pants. So far.

In lieu of my adventures in corporate America, here's some writing I did for the Boston Phoenix's Best Reader's Poll 2011:

Best Local Nonprofit
Best Barbecue
Best Burgers
Best Gluten-Free Menu
Best Pies Vs. Cupcakes
Best Restaurant, Romantic

This was very much not a case of writing for the paycheck. I honestly love and recommend all of these places. I'm just sad that I didn't get to do the Boomerangs write-up too. Although given how much of my home is decorated with pieces scavenged from there, it's entirely possible my write-up would have been, "It's terrible. Don't go there. MORE FOR ME, MWA HA HA HA."

Odds & Ends

Big-ass china cabinet at West Roxbury Boomerangs, just $100! It needs to be painted, but it's in great shape. The velvet couch must've found a home, because it's been gone for a couple of weeks.


The chair whose cushion led to the destruction of my lamp. I got up the courage to go back to the project, but I think my father-in-law's staple gun is from 1974 and the kickback was so bad I was afraid I'd destroy something else, so it's on hold again.


Finished cork boards from remedial home ec. It was easy to pull the fabric off of the upside down one and reglue it. The glue gun has also come in handy in fixing Baby Razor's environmentally-friendly, made-with-love wooden toys, which are falling apart. I guess love is a crap adhesive.

In case you're keeping track: glue gun=success. Staples/staple gun=mayhem.

A song I love from my Baby Razor's favorite kids' show:



And finally, Baby Razor is all set for Red Sox Opening Day:

She's Thrifty

Updates:

1) Apparently all the shower needed was to be publicly shamed, because we are now getting hot-ish water regularly.

2) Food I forgot to mention from Leigh's visit: mini-cannolis, mini- key lime and chocolate tarts, caramel popcorn, chocolate truffles, garlicky green olives, gruyere, ciabatta bread, and artichoke tapenade. Nom.

All right, let's talk about that couch up there. How fierce is that thing? It's $100 at Boomerangs in West Roxbury if you're in the market for a swoopy, red-velvet bit-o-awesome. Although yesterday was half-price furniture day, so I make no guarantees for it still being there.

Since moving to Boston's faux-burbs in July, all of my "splurge" purchases have come from Boomerangs, which is a thrift store that benefits the AIDS Action Committee. Yeah, that's right: my idea of treating myself is a $6 pair of secondhand shoes. I've got a toddler, a mortgage, a car loan, and an unsteady income, meaning some weeks even TJ Maxx is too rich for my blood.

I'm not complaining, especially when these are the shoes:



They're J Crew and the interwebs tell me they retail for around $200. Granted, they're not exactly my size, but for $6, who cares? (The crock pot in the background is mine. It's not old, it's vintage, okay?)

Of course, the thing about thrift shops is that you can't go in looking for something, because their stock is unpredictable and ever changing. But I had so many things that I needed when we moved that I think I came home with something nearly every time I visited for the first three months or so. (I had a home with more than three rooms to decorate for the first time in my life, and I'd finally admitted to myself that buying clothes that fit was not going to doom me to staying my post-pregnancy weight for the rest of my life.)

Right now I'm on the lookout for furniture, which is the trickiest because if you see something you like, you really have to buy it immediately. I wanted an arm chair and a pair of end tables I saw on a Friday evening, and by the time I came back with my car on Saturday afternoon, both were gone. The feeling that you've gotten a great deal that no one else is going to get is the absolute best part of secondhand shopping, but missing out on a unique find is probably the worst.

Some people don't like thrift shops because they don't like going through stuff that used to belong to other people. I don't get this at all. I admit that I may have a bit of a skewed perspective, though, given that when I was a small child, my dad would take me dump picking. It's exactly what it sounds like: back in the day, before dumps became landfills, we'd spend the occasional Saturday afternoon picking through the pile of salvageable stuff and fending off territorial sea gulls. (Lest you think my dad was a hobo or a hoarder, this was a common enough practice where I grew up that one of the landfills built a shed to house people's reusable items and dubbed it the dumptique. Really.)

My mother, too, is a master of turning the old into new. Our house was built on another old dumping ground, and as they were digging the foundation, Mom picked some old glass bottles out of the dirt, washed them off and put them around the kitchen. She cracks up when people ask where she got such lovely antiques. (I also didn't realize until I started studying Victorian history in high school that our napkins were stored in a salvaged chamber pot. My mom really can decorate with anything.)

Mom, of course, adores Boomerangs and was gutted that I didn't get the arm chair. I told her it was fine, something else cute and cheap is bound to appear sooner or later, and this time I'll be ready to pounce.