Acquisitions and an Announcement!

At the risk of leading you to think that I spend all my time acquiring things and not enough time creating things (ahem...), I wanted to share some more treasures and findings from the past week or two.

My mother and I made another trip to Clover Market during her visit, and I came away with some great additions to my paper stash:

Last time we went, I saw very few vintage photographs; this time it seemed as though every other vendor had at least a small stack for sale.  They varied in price from $1 to $3, and I came away with quite a few.

Old photographs really bring home to me the realness of history--these were real people living real lives in the times I've only read about in history books.  I mean wouldn't you love to have hung out with these guys (above) in 1920?  (Specifically, February 8, 1920.)

How about Gertrude and Curt here?  They look like a pretty fun couple.

I wonder what became of this little boy, standing bare foot in the bushes in his convict-stripe pajamas.

And who did this lovely lady marry, in her gorgeous velvet and taffeta dress, with an oversized bow to decorate that great poofy hair?

The back of this sweet photo says, "Mande Trout, age 10."  Age 10 is awfully hard to believe!  If so, we clearly grow up way too fast in this day and age.

Finally, I don't purchase nearly as many photos of men, as they don't tend to speak to me in the same way as women, children, and couples, but I kind of liked this well-dressed, jaunty fellow.  That's just a sampling of the interesting personalities I "met" through my vintage photo acquisitions.

I also bought a Water Birds Bird Guide by Chester A. Reed published in 1921.  His preface, written in 1906, extolled the virtues of using a bird guide to identify strange birds observed in the wild, since the ornithologist of yester year "had but one course open to him, that is to shoot the bird, take it home, then pore through pages of descriptions, until one was found to correspond to the specimen."  Well, thank goodness I don't have to shoot any water birds to find out what I'm looking at when I'm at the beach!

I found three different little ledger books:  a book of vintage graph paper that was quickly abandoned by Harry Hill back in 1936, a dock book filled with notes on import invoicing, and a ledger belonging to Mrs. Ed Heltz of Miwaukee, containing some gas records, some scattered notes, and a few blank pages.  (13.1 gallons of gas cost her $4.05, by the way!)

The Pièce de résistance of this particular shopping day, though, is this large ledger filled with accounts from May 16, 1898 to July 20, 1903.  It's not clear what is being tracked, but it's still an interesting piece of history and a wonderful source of vintage papers. 

And if that's not enough, I went to two of my local libraries' used book sales this past Saturday, and came away with both arty and non-arty books to add to my shelves:

In addition to these art books, I also got a series of nine small art books featuring the works of artists including Stael, Klee, Miro, Braque and Mondrian.  I am going to be using their work to inspire my drawing and painting practice; why not draw inspiration from the very best?!

I bought three books of musical scores, which frequently feature in the things I make.

Another great find was The Architectural Plates from Diderot's "Encyclopedie".  Tremendous envelope-making fodder in this large book!

So now I think it's time to stop shopping and hunker down in Studio 791 to play with all my latest treasures and findings, don't you think?

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BIG NEWS:

My next post will feature my very first giveaway on this blog,

 so don't miss it!

Crafternoons and Crafterevenings

Last week at this time, my mother and I were knee-deep in art supplies, making the best use possible of our brief time together. 

We started her visit by trading arty gifts with one another.  She brought me three new rubber stamps for my ever-expanding collection, and I got her a waterbrush and an inexpensive set of pan watercolors to play around with while she was here. 

We set up our workshop in the dining room:

Mom is now a waterbrush convert!

She's been doing her own altered Rolodex project at home:  She glues a business card to one side of the Rolodex, and then creates a thematically-linked collage on the other side!  So, of course, we had to spend some time on Rolodex cards together, using our newly acquired stamp stash:

My mom is getting a little tired of me taking these photos of her, leaning over various projects, but I just can't resist!

You'll noticed we moved our base of operations to the breakfast area, because the dining room is so totally dim at night.

I know I'm not the only one who loves a good pic of yummy art supplies--a painty palette, beautiful stamps, bright watercolors.

Here is one side of the Rolodex cards I created:

And here is the other side:

Mom and I did a swap; she took the blue card above and I chose this one from her collection:

I also shared with her the strategy of using gel medium to adhere napkins to journal pages for a lovely translucent effect, and showed her the butterfly page from my Gift from the Sea journal.  That sent us to the party store to buy a huge stash of inexpensive napkins to play with in our journals:

Here, mom used a gorgeous yellow and white napkin as a background, then cut out flip-flop images from another napkin over the top of it.  She used pen to outline the shoes for a better effect.  I took one of my famous "Mom at the work table" photos, but didn't take a pic of her page!  I'll share some of my "napkin art journal pages" in a future post.

She was also interested in the paperbag journals I made for my girls using a link I found on April Cole's blog to a tutorial for making little notebooks out of paper lunch bags.  So, of course, we had to make some of our own:

My mom had the idea of using some of our paper napkins to decorate the covers of our little notebooks.

It would be such a fabulous thing if we lived nearer to one another and didn't have to watch our time together so carefully.  But as it was,we had four lovely days to amuse ourselves with the girls, enjoy excursions like Briggs Auction and Morris Arboretum, and PLAY-PLAY-PLAY with whatever creative idea caught our fancy. 

I'm already ready for her next visit!

Hitting the Jackpot, MY Style

This past Friday evening, I headed back to Briggs Auction with my mother, visiting for the weekend from Kentucky.  (Remember, I was there the previous weekend buying chickens and marbles with my husband!)  We were single-minded in our goal to walk out of there with postage stamps for our art-making, and we were NOT disappointed!

In the five years I've been going to this auction on-and-off, I have only brought home postage stamps on one other occasion.  I thought it might be too much to hope for that they would be offering stamps on the particular weekend my mother was coming with me.  But we truly hit the jackpot.

When we got home on Friday evening, we sat with glasses of wine, sorting through all the stamps.  If we saw something we wanted, we would hold it out to each other and say, "Can I have this one?  Can I have this one?"  The ones we didn't want, we put into piles to hand over to each other.  We had quite a system going.

My share of the postal haul abundantly fills two cigar boxes; my mom carried her share home in a gallon plastic bag to make it easier to take on the plane. 

In addition, I brought home a stamp collector's book.  He glued the stamps directly to the page so they cannot be removed.  However, as far as I'm concerned, the pages themselves are awesome art!

They present such an interesting view of history, often including countries that don't even exist anymore, or countries that were once colonial holdings.

Each stamp is a work of art.

Tucked in with the stamp album was an envelope holding several old stock certificates from 1884:

I think the items I bid on must have all come from the same estate, a man who used to be in the U.S. Navy.  In addition to the stamps, the lot included:

Postcards of San Francisco

A certificate declaring Charles Lee, Jr., as Honor Man at the U.S Naval Training Station in Bainbridge, Maryland, for the period of training completed May 16, 1946.

The certificate included a handwritten list of various names on the back.

Some extremely spooky photographs of the nuclear weapons tests in the Bikini Atoll

A naval training booklet and group photo, with smaller versions of the Bikini Atoll photos and a book entitled A BlueJackets' Manual for the US Navy from 1944.  Now I can be prepared for hammock inspection, using inflated trousers as a float to rescue myself in case of emergency, what to do in case I am taken prisoner by the enemy, and how to conduct myself during military drills!

Another training class photo from 1946

What an abundance of treasures!  What is your favorite?  And how would YOU put these findings to creative use?