My birthday, by the numbers

Number of years I've been alive, as of today: 31

Temperature outside right now, at 2:00 pm: 60 degrees

Number of times my birthday has ever been this cold: ZERO



Number of thrift stores I visited while Maren was in school this morning: 2

Number of fun things I bought: 5

Number of buttons I bought: 0

Number of bags of buttons I seriously considered buying before I came to my senses: 1



Number of Key Lime Cupcakes in the oven right now: 24

Number of Key Lime Cupcakes soon to be in my tummy: um....let's skip to the next question

Number of dinner dishes I intend to wash tonight: zero! We're going out to eat!

Number of blessings in my life: too many to count!

Is there a 12-step program for this?

Does anyone know of a support group or 1-800 helpline for the truly Button Obsessed?
Seriously, I think it's getting worse. These are some of the buttons I bought this past weekend on our trip to Durango. Help--somebody save me from myself! Forget button flowers; I'm moving on to button gardens.

Also among the spoils from this weekend's junking: a jadeite ashtray (nobody in this house smokes but you had better believe that if I see jadeite for $2, it's coming home with me--I don't care WHAT type of object it is) and a couple of strings of red mercury glass beads.

Button love

I'm sick--with the the Button Bug. I've always been afflicted but lately it has been bad. I blame those darn button bouquets for my current flare-up; I wiped out my supply of large buttons in several colors, so I've been on the hunt for more.

On Monday I found myself at the giant antique mall. I was supposed to be doing some birthday shopping for others but ended up finding a few treasures of my own(doesn't that always happen?). Among my finds were several jars of buttons: two jars were ridiculously cheap and one jar was ridiculously expensive, but it all evened out because contained in those jars were some of the absolute BEST vintage buttons I've yet to find!

Colorful plastic buttons in all sizes and shapes...These Lucite & glitter buttons were the ones that convinced me to buy the expensive jar--LOVE them! The three black buttons at the left are SO fabulous--they have faceted glass insets and look how huge they are (that's a quarter in the center for scale)! In my imagination, they came off a really amazing 1960s black boucle swing coat.Huge faux tortoiseshell (again with the quarter for scale) and lots of real shell buttons...
And LOTS of sparklies...
The large jar had quite a few old metal buttons that have become encrusted with green corrosion (rust?), which then rubbed off on all the other buttons. I gave them all a soapy bath and a gentle scrub but the corrosion didn't come off of the metal buttons. Do any of my fellow vintage button lovers out there know if there is any way to get rid of that for good? Some of the buttons are SO neat and I hate to have to throw them away.The Mister has been making fun of me because every time he's walked into the kitchen since Monday night, he's found me fiddling with my new buttons, arranging them by size and color and type, and just generally fondling them. I can't help it! Could you?

New Vintage-inspired papercrafting products

Just wanted to share a few of the fun art supplies I've picked up recently:
Making Memories just came out with a darling line of papercrafting embellishments called Vintage Findings. It's available at Michael's (so you can use those handy 40% off coupons!) and the line is made up of reproductions of some of the vintage art supplies that we know and love. I picked up these repro velvet flowers and leaves--they look just as good as the real thing to me! These little brown-bordered labels look just like the red and white Dennison labels that I ADORE but are very hard for me to find outside of paying through the nose on eBay. I love the red and white but I also like having another color option in these little guys.

The other item in this photo is a bottle of Tim Holtz Distress Stickles in Antique Linen. Stickles are one of my top 5 papercrafting must-have products! I love the look of German glass glitter but let's face it--it's a mess! Stickles are little bottles of glitter glue that have a tiny nozzle so it's possible to get a very fine application, and it's VERY sparkly and comes in a rainbow of colors. The new line of Distress Stickles are made in more muted colors and they're not quite as sparkly. I love this Antique Linen color--it's hard to tell from the photo, but it dries a pale gold that is very vintage looking and so pretty!At Archiver's I found this fun sheet of Perforated Tickets by SEI. The tickets are all different colors and sizes and look just like antique ephemera, plus they're cheap! Only $1.99 for a 12x12 sheet of tickets--I could never find real ephemera for the same price. The other item is a box of K & Co. chipboard letters from the Life's Journey line. These chipboard letters look like they were punched out of old ledger sheets with spidery handwriting. They're even double-sided--not strictly necessary for letters that can only face one way, but a nice finishing touch if you use them in a project where the backs might show.

Now to play with my new goodies!

I believe I mentioned something about being obsessed

Made using Lisa Pace's tutorial here. My JoAnn's sells precut lengths of brown floral wire, which was perfect for this project because the brown worked well with the neutral tones of the buttons & papers. I used a combination of vintage book pages, dictionary pages, ledger pages and various scrapbook papers to back the large clear buttons. The buttons are these--I found mine at Archiver's.

Half-Blood Prince movie review & button flowers

Last night The Mister and I had a rare weeknight date--we had the opportunity to attend a 6 p.m. preview showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince! I must admit that I felt a bit smug when I was walking in at 5:30 pm, past all the costumed folks who were already queuing up for the official midnight opening show. The movie was great! I'm still processing it (and I need a rewatch of #5) but I'm thinking that so far it's the best film of the bunch. The only criticism I have so far is the movie's explanation of who exactly the Half-Blood Prince is--it is different from the explanation in the book, and the way it is presented felt really cursory and almost like an afterthought: "Oh yeah, I guess we have to tell the audience what the title of the movie is all about. Here, let's just throw in this line at the end."

I always thought in the book that it was pretty flimsy anyway; it felt like J.K. Rowling thought up a really good suspenseful-sounding title that unfortunately was only a minor plot point. It seemed like such a big deal because after all, it's the title of the book--but finding out the identity of the Half-Blood Prince was kind of a let-down. In the movie it is explained in one line of dialogue spoken by one character and seemed thrown in at the end with no relation to the rest of the story. That could be the fault of the editing process and really it's a minor quibble, since I thought it wasn't particularly well-done in the book to begin with.
I have a new craft addiction: making button flowers! What better way to justify having such a ridiculous stash of buttons? They're easy and you get instant gratification--you don't even have to wait for glue to dry! I've had such fun picking through my buttons to find just the right combinations for layering.

This black, white and apple green bouquet is a little treat for a friend who had a birthday a few days ago; I made them to match her kitchen. I just hope she doesn't read this before I can get over to her house later today to drop them off!

If you want to try your hand at making your own button bouquet, there's a great tutorial here (although I do them differently and don't twist the wire between each button grouping). Next up, I want to try some bouquets using paper-backed clear buttons like these by Lisa Pace. I also love this version with book paper petals by Cathe Holden. Give them a try--but I'll accept no blame if you become addicted too!

Rekindling my junking flame

Last week I managed to find a yard sale that restored my faith in garage saling in general. Lately I've lost the will to go junking--I think I'm just OD'd on sales that seem to be full of nothing but baby junk and old VHS tapes. I never seem to find the kind of good junk I see on blogs and message boards and I'm just discouraged. I really haven't been to many sales this season because I just can't muster up the motivation to go wade through piles of stained baby clothes and eleventy hundred copies of What to Expect When You're Expecting. I live smack in the middle of the suburbs so that's why I see a high concentration of baby crapola and toys at sales. I often blame my lack of successful junking on the fact that this area is so new and feel like I need to drive to older areas (older areas usually = more established residents which usually = older junk, the kind I like) to increase my chances of finding the good junk Problem is, I live on the edge of town and to get to the older area is really quite a bit of a drive. This particular sale was in what I would call a newer area of town, but it was held by an older woman, so it helped me remember that older people do not exclusively live in the older parts of town.
See, this is the good junk that I (almost) never find. The kind of stuff that I drool over on Laurie's and Barbara's and Shara's blogs on a weekly basis. Things like vintage glass bead picks with tinsel, and unused bunches of mercury glass ball picks.
Or stacks of vintage foil leaves in all colors and shapes, with the "Made in Japan" paper labels still attached.Or these really amazing twisted mercury glass floral picks, still in their original paper wrappings. (Look for those in my etsy shop this Christmas!)
It really must have been my lucky day, because I even scored at the thrift store. I found a small silver bowl (an engraved trophy from a 1965 tennis tournament), a great metal urn (that will likely be spray painted a fun color), and fun vintage jewelry including a string of big pearls. I even found an apron from this company! It's this style, but in different fabrics. Online they sell for almost $40 but mine was just over $2, and the empire cut is perfect to go over my big belly.

My junking flame was definitely rekindled last Thursday. Finding this sale proves to me that there is still good junk to be had, it's just a matter of being persistent and a little bit lucky!

Mt. Rushmore trip report: Day 3

Sunday morning we checked out of our hotel and hit the road. We had the first of several unsuccessful attempts at finding geocaches (rotten luck that day!) and headed up through the Black Hills to northwestern South Dakota.Our destination was Devils Tower, made most famous by its appearance in this movie. It was quite far out of the way but it was something I've always wanted to see, and who knows when we'll ever be up in that part of the country again so we decided to go for it.

I'm so glad we made the effort because it's really neat! In my mind I had it shooting straight up out of the desert, but in reality the landscape is quite hilly and green with lots of trees.

We hit the visitor's center so Maren could get another stamp in her passport but decided to forgo the 1.3-mile hike around the base of the Tower. I would like to have gone so that we could have seen it up close, but a thunderstorm was brewing and quite frankly, we were all just sick of hiking!It was a long drive home along pretty much the entire north-south length of Wyoming. I'm fairly certain that we drove through the most seriously boring part of Wyoming, between Gillette and Douglas. We didn't get home until 11:00 pm that night.

While our first day at Mt. Rushmore didn't go even remotely as planned and we never got to see the fireworks over the Presidents, I'm still glad we went. We had a fun time as a family and got to see neat things. For any of my local friends who might be planning a trip, let me know if you have any more questions about the area!

Mt. Rushmore trip report: Day 2

Okay, so now that I've written my sob story about our initial Mt. Rushmore experience, I do have to assure you (and Kayleen from the SD Office of Tourism) that thankfully, things did get better!Friday morning we got up and drove about 20 minutes west to Jewel Cave National Monument, where we had tickets for an 11:00 am cave tour. They offer a few different lengths of tours, but we chose the 1 1/2-hour Scenic Tour, which leads you along a 1/2-mile loop, up and down 723 stair steps. I was still sore and tired from the exertions of the day before so suffice it to say that I was not the speediest person in the group. The different cave formations we got to see were really fascinating! The tour was very interesting and informative, and somehow there seemed to be more down stairs than up stairs so in the end it was worth all of the walking. There are additional outside hikes that can be taken at Jewel Cave but we were too tired!One fun thing we did at Jewel Cave was purchase a National Park Passport for Maren. This is a little spiral-bound notebook with information on all of the National Parks, Monuments, Memorials, etc. throughout the country, divided up by region. All of these places should have a set of special rubber stamps that you can stamp in your passport book: a cancellation with the date you visited, and a pictorial stamp representing the place you visited. Maren loved being able to carry around her book and got it stamped two more times on our trip! If we can manage not to lose it, it will be something fun that we can take with us on our family trips.After we left Jewel Cave it was time for lunch, so we stopped back in Custer at The Purple Pie Place. This was a cute little restaurant (with an exterior painted a shocking pink & purple) that serves soup/sandwiches and ice cream, but their specialty is the delicious homemade pie! The Mister had a slice of double-crust strawberry rhubarb and mine was peanut butter & chocolate cream pie. Both of them were to die for and I'd love to have been let loose at the rotating pie case with a big fork. :)We rolled ourselves out of the Purple Pie Place and headed back up to Mt. Rushmore to see all of the things that had been too crowded the day before. The weather was beautiful by then and although there were lots of other visitors, it didn't seem too crowded at all. Despite the fact that we had just stuffed our faces full of pie, we succumbed to the lure of the amazing ice cream that we saw everyone around us eating. The Mister chose soft-serve raspberry and vanilla and I have to say that was hands down the BEST soft-serve cone I've ever eaten! The raspberry ice cream was so, so yummy--very tart and flavorful. The only way that it could have been better is if they offered a raspberry/chocolate twist cone--now that would be truly amazing! Trust me when I say that when you go to Mt. Rushmore, you need to get the ice cream. I don't care what kind of diet you're on, just do it--you won't regret it!

After we scarfed our ice cream we spent several hours taking the requisite tourist photos and seeing all of the exhibits and sights. This photo cracks me up--I asked a nearby woman if she'd take a photo of my little family so we could all be in it, and when I checked the camera afterwards I realized she'd cut off the faces on the mountain!While I appreciate her willingness to help us out, how did she not get that having the Presidents in the picture with was kind of the whole point? Otherwise we could be at any old mountain. Luckily I caught it and was able to have another man take our photos, after I expressly asked him to make sure the Presidents were in it.I really loved Mt. Rushmore! It was beautiful and awe-inspiring, especially once we learned all about the sculptor and what it took to construct such an incredible memorial. It was especially poignant to visit a place called "The Shrine of Democracy" on July 4 and remember the contributions of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln to making our nation great!

After we left Mt. Rushmore we continued to the nearby Iron Mountain Road, a gorgeous scenic drive through the Black Hills. The road is winding and filled with beautiful scenery (I bet it is absolutely breathtaking in the autumn with the colors). The highlights are three stone tunnels that have been constructed to perfectly frame views of Mt. Rushmore--even the trees seem to have been trimmed so as not to obstruct the view of the faces! From there we continued on to a neighboring road, the Needles Highway, named because of the large granite formations called "needles".By the time we got back to Custer it was past 7:00 pm and we still had to find dinner before the town's fireworks show started at 9:00 pm. Everyone else had the same idea as we did leading to 30+ minute waits for all of the restaurants, as a result we ended up at a German place which was our 5th or 6th choice, just above getting burgers at the Dairy Queen. In retrospect, I think we should have just headed for the Dairy Queen and gotten Blizzards, because the German food was seriously mediocre. We watched the fireworks, a pretty good show for such a small town, and then headed back to the hotel for the night.

Mt. Rushmore trip report: The best fireworks ever...

...that we never actually got to see.

Yeah.

I'll warn you up front that this trip report may be a little more detailed (read: boring) than I would normally post, but only because I have some local friends who read this who may want to go on a similar trip someday and I'd love to share our experiences with them. So if you're bored, look at the photos and then come back on Thursday! :)

The drive on Thursday was mostly uneventful. I say mostly, because somewhere north of the sprawling metropolis of Lusk, WY, we were caught in the most gnarly rainstorm I've ever seen in my entire life! We (and everyone else on the road) actually had to pull over for a while to let it pass because visibility was down to nearly zero. No kidding, I would not have been one tiny bit surprised to look out the window and see a funnel cloud snaking toward the ground--it was that kind of storm. In fact, The Mister saw a storm chaser van pass us going the other way when traffic started moving again!Because of a later-than-planned start, stopping for a long lunch in Cheyenne and our rainstorm delay we didn't get into Custer, SD until 8:00 pm. I had hoped that we'd be there earlier in the afternoon so that we could have visited Crazy Horse Memorial and seen the laser light show that they put on each evening. Instead, we had a late pizza dinner and then headed to bed. (For my local friends, we stayed at the Comfort Inn & Suites and I can definitely recommend it. Clean, nice rooms, good free breakfast, decent rate, good location.)

Friday morning we got up and breakfasted and noted with dismay that it was raining. Not hard, but the clouds looked heavy and low and the sprinkle turned to a drizzle pretty quickly. The Mt. Rushmore website said that the parking garage at the monument opened at 7:00 am and was often full by 10:00 am, but we heard other sources say that the parking garage didn't fill up until later. We hedged our bets and so we didn't work too hard at being out the door at the crack of dawn and hoped that the yucky weather would delay some people. We reached the parking garage at about 10:05 am and guess what? It was full. In fact, it had been full for quite a while.
Mt. Rushmore is at the peak of a mountain so the road slopes down on either side. Once the parking garage is full, they have people park on the shoulder of the road going down each side of the mountain. We drove until the line of cars on the shoulder stopped and ended up parking TWO MILES down the hill from Mt. Rushmore, almost to the town of Keystone. So that means 10.5 hours before fireworks were even scheduled to begin, the closest we could get was two miles away. Oy. We had plenty of time to kill, so we put on our jackets and grabbed the umbrella (which I'm thankful that The Mister insisted upon bringing--I may have left it home, as the weather report only forecast a 40% chance of rain) and headed the quarter mile or so down into Keystone to explore in the rain.

Keystone is the closest town to Mt. Rushmore and it is super-touristy. And not cool kitschy-touristy, more cheesy-touristy. Many of the attractions were not even open due to the rain--the putt-putt course, the 1880 train, the chairlift, the helicopter rides. We ended up at the Gutzon Borglum museum, mostly because it was indoors. We took a very informative self-guided audio tour and ended up learning quite a lot about Borglum, the sculptor for Mt. Rushmore. (Plus I just like saying Gutzon Borglum...doesn't it sound like something the Swedish Chef might be cooking on The Muppet Show?) The museum bills itself as "an exciting tour for the whole family!" but unless your four-year-old is heavy into Art History, she'll probably be as bored as mine was.
When we finished the museum tour the rain had gotten worse, but after spending a few minutes in the gift shop there was nothing else to do but go back out into the rain. We walked further into the downtown area, which consisted mostly of tacky T-shirt shops and ice cream parlors. We stopped for lunch at one of the restaurants (which was so mediocre I don't even remember the name). Lunch was leisurely, as we were in no hurry to get back out into the rain. Finally it was time to leave, so we walked back up to the car (a good half mile or more) to wait and see if the rain let up before we headed up the hill to Mt. Rushmore. Fortunately we'd brought along our portable DVD player and a copy of National Treasure 2 (chosen because it ends up at Mt. Rushmore; this would have also been a fun choice) so we put the down the seats in the back of the car and made ourselves a nest with our fireworks-watching blankets and settled in to wait for a while.

Finally at about 4:00 pm the rain had stopped, so we gathered up our backpacks and blankets and set out for the two mile climb up the hill--a hill so steep that it is a 10% grade at some points. The rain had stopped and although the air was on the cool side the humidity was still somewhere north of 80%, making for a very sticky hike, and let's not forget that I am 6.5 months pregnant which means that naturally, I had to go potty. I have to give huge praise to Maren, who soldiered all the way up that hill on her little four-year-old legs and never complained at all! She was AWESOME! At first I was kicking myself for not bringing the stroller for her to ride in but it would have actually been very difficult to push up such a steep hill.The sun had come out by the time we finally reached Mt. Rushmore, at about 5:30 pm, where we joined the other 10,000 people who had come to watch the festivities. Because it was quite literally wall-to-wall people (some of whom had been there since the early morning to claim spots for their chairs) we weren't able to see many of the exhibits. We eventually found ourselves a spot on a concrete walkway where we could see the entertainment going on down in the amphitheater and where we'd be able to see the fireworks as well and settled in. Sometime around 8:00 pm, the clouds started to look menacing and headed our way again. It got colder and everyone got their rain gear out to get ready for the rain that threatened. It didn't ever rain, but what did happen was that a fog bank rolled in so heavy and low that it was difficult to see the amphitheater stage anymore, and seeing the faces on the mountain was completely out of the question.
The fog was so thick and heavy that it would have taken a big storm or wind to get it to budge. Obviously, this meant that fireworks would be impossible to see. The announcer tried to keep the crowd positive, but of course it didn't look good. We broke the news to Maren, and bless her heart, she cried and cried, "No fireworks!" Honestly, I can't say that I blamed the poor child--I felt like crying too! After all we'd endured--driving 7 hours to get there, spending so much on a hotel room and food, not to mention spending all morning in the rain and then the grueling two-hour road march up the mountain, all for nothing. And to top it all off, I'd 'wasted' Maren's cute 4th of July outfit on a day where I couldn't even take any photos because of the rain and crowds. To say that it was incredibly disappointing is an understatement indeed.

At 9:30 pm when the fireworks were scheduled to start, the announcer came back and said they had decided to go ahead with the show despite the weather. We waited a few more minutes while they got things ready, and then they started shooting off the fireworks, although all that was visible through the fog were glows of different colors and very occasionally we could see a sparkle or two. Judging from the sounds of how many shells were launched, it would indeed have been the best fireworks ever...had we been able to see it! I still can't believe they didn't just cancel the whole thing, rather than waste tens of thousands of dollars blowing off fireworks that no one could see.When it was all over, we packed up our stuff and headed out for the two mile walk back down the mountain to the car. Poor Maren was completely exhausted by that point, and rode on Daddy's shoulders the whole way down. Actually, she slept on Daddy's shoulders the whole way down, making for a precarious trip for both her and The Mister, because she kept falling this way and that and I was afraid she'd fall backwards and they'd both be injured. Oh, and as we were walking, the skies finally started to clear and we could see the stars for the first time that night. Nice irony.

By the time we walked to the car and then drove back to Custer the long way around (they close the road over the mountain so you can only go the direction you were parked) we didn't get back to the hotel until nearly midnight, at which point we were all so exhausted that we literally fell into bed and were snoring within minutes.

Whew...I warned you that would be long & detailed! Tomorrow I'll be back with days 2 & 3 of our trip.

Hurrah for the Fourth of July!

We're off to see the big faces in the mountain! Should be an adventure for certain. Wishing you all a fun and memorable Fourth of July!