Thrifting ingenuity

Hello there.

My goodness, I missed my first day of posting yesterday! Life has been hectic, therefore I have nothing wonderful to report in regards to either my dress, or my blanket, which is quite sad. However, since it is Thrift-day, I do have an intriguing idea (and project!) to discuss.

Thrifting your own items. Meaning, when you have a project in mind, look around your own house, dig deep in the storage rooms or the corners of your closet or your unending craft bin to see if there's something that just might fit.

For our Thanksgiving weekend, I am making my dress and an envelope purse, but I desperately needed earrings and bracelets. Now once again, I have a unique situation because by the time I decided to start dressing vintage, I had already gauged my ears to size 0. Obviously, vintage earrings became almost entirely ruled out by this fact, but more often than not, I didn't even look for jewelry. I've spent the last 2 weeks searching my local thrift store for wonderful earrings I could some how fashion into being usable by my gauged ears. But I'm coming to find, that this isn't going to happen unless some ingenuity is involved. Some vintage jewelry is clip-on style and others are screw-on style. But neither really work for me.

I have yet to completely solve the problem, which brings me to my project. For my wedding, I made my necklace from fake pearls weaved together on a chain, so I have a ton left over. I also happen to own a pair of wooden plugs that will never be used again, so I decided to repurpose them and make my own vintage styled earrings! Now I wasn't sure how to rig this whole project together until Carl mentioned buttons. I know this sounds horribly hoaky, but I promise, it will be beautiful. And this project is going to be made entirely from items that I thrifted from my own stash.

I've had lots of success doing this very same thing when it comes to other projects. I also happen to live in a house that was built by my grandparents and occasionally I find amazing treasures right under my nose (it is, in fact, how I located my craft table that I will some day photograph to show you, once my craft room doesn't look like a bomb went off in the middle of it).