Pine cones, assemble! Prepare to be put in the oven!

I've got a box of pine cones that have come into my life...and I need to make sure there are no creepy crawly things on them, & that the sap is less....sappy.

To the oven I go. I shall report back once I am done baking these little buggers.

Discoveries, discoveries, discoveries!

So, I was given a few boxes of 'stuff' from an estate auction here in TN, but had no idea what the heck was in them. There were a few piece of obvious 'junk' (not the good kind of junk!), but there were also some kinda interesting things as well. The thing I'm loving right now is this bag (?) from the Markle Lead Works that used to be in St. Louis. 

It's been beat up a bit over the years, & has reddish stains on the side that has what looks like a drawing of the factory, but overall it's kinda interesting. I found a quote about the history of the company & such, but other than that most info about what I've found & how old it probably is just isn't jumping out & hitting me. 

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this, but it's just too cool to throw away.

"The Markle Lead Works, National Lead Company, and the Hoyt Metal Company were consolidated into the United Lead Company in 1905. This plant covered 30 acres of land and employed 500 men who made lead bullets and pellets for shotgun shells. A wooden "shot" tower 90 feet high was used for making the pellets. At the top of the tower, molten lead was poured through a sieve device which allowed lead particles to splash into a water-filled tank at the bottom of the tower."--Quote from the book Granite City : a pictorial history.

Random Find In DC

While on my way to a salvage store in DC yesterday, I passed a home that was being taken apart. I saw they were just throwing everything away, & I couldn't leave without at least asking if I could save anything from the dump. 

This window was original to the house, which was apparently built in 1921. I'm loving it!

I couldn't help myself and went back this morning, just in case. I looked inside the rowhouse & it'd be taken apart all the way to just the foundation & support beams. I nearly cried when they told me they sent everything to the dump around 6am this morning. 

Yes, I have a weird love of trying to 'save' old things. It breaks my heart for some reason to see things that are still useful just being thrown away!

I am now in possession of tons of things to work on.

I will take pics & post them soon, I'm just exhausted today.

So excited to have all kinds of cool things to play with! (And thank you very, very much to the person that decided to let me have all of them.)

When An Ad On Craigslist Says 'Free Fabric'....

I'm the kind of girl that combs through the 'free' section of Craigslist on multiple occasions each day. Sometimes the good stuff is gone so fast that the ad seems to disappear before I can even email/call about getting more information about whatever is being advertised, so when I saw an ad for 'FREE FABRIC' a little bit ago, I emailed instantaneously.


The fact that I got an email back 5 minutes later with more info made me slightly giddy. I always, always  need fabric for different projects, & I am not the kind of girl to argue with free. Even if only 50% of the stuff they had was decent it was FREE, so I hopped in the car & made my way over to the address I was given.


When I got to the location I nearly choked to death. The ad failed to mention that there was damn near half a warehouse full of boxed and bagged up fabric. Remnants, rolls, scraps, trims....everything a person could ever even think about needing for crafting/art projects. I only had one problem-I had to take entire boxes, picking through things wasn't allowed. And I had to take at least 10 boxes. 10 very, very large boxes. Boxes I could fit myself inside.

I am now the proud owner of almost 1000lbs of fabric. I'm pretty sure it's more fabric than I could even think of using in the next few years, but I'm up for suggestions as to how to utilize all of this stuff in some way.

Lesson here? When an ad on Craigslist says 'FREE FABRIC', sometimes you end up with way, way, way than you bargained for...