Banners, Decorating, Shopping, The "Job" Jar, and more Shopping

Okay, I spent a good two hours yesterday monkeying around with my banner. All I can say is, I need some skills. Computer skills that is. Not thrilled with how it turned out, but fortunately, help is on it's way. I hope. I have contacted Gail at Shabby Cottage Studio who did an adorable banner for my friend Cindy. Gail does banners and sells all kinds of crafty goodies on her website. Awesome prices too.

Friday I spent a couple hours over at Isabel's house doing a little decorating with her and Joy. She wanted to redo her mantel which is huge and can hold a ton of stuff. I really loved how it turned out. Very sweet and so Isabel. Here are some pictures of what we came up with.

Isabel getting stuff off the mantel. (Before pic.)

Left side of mantel (After)

Right side of mantel. (After)

Close up of my favorite part.

This was such a fun project to work on with Isabel and Joy as Isabel has so much great stuff to work with.

For more pictures of Isabel's lovely collections, you can go here and here.

Okay, so early Saturday morning I headed out to the above mentioned Cindy's sale. If you haven't checked out her blog before, please do so. She is an incredible artist and has such a wonderful gift of display. She posted pictures of the "shop" and everything was just lovely. I bought a cute birdie, nest and some valentines goodies for the swap I'm doing. (see my sidebar) After that Joy and I headed over to Monticello where I needed to pick up our December check and do a little shopping. I was very good. I only bought one thing and it was marked down from $49 to $25. Here's a picture of all the goodies I got on Saturday including some cute stuff I got from Isabel for Christmas.

The cabinet was my Monticello purchase. The cute "sewing room" sign, Isabel had custom made for me from someone on ebay. She also gave me some sweet vintage wallpaper and the adorable hand painted rose box. The little scrolly basket the bird and nest are in was a last minute purchase from Cindy at her sale.

Saturday afternoon I finally tackled the job of putting away the Christmas stuff. I never like this job, but it felt good to get the living room back to the way it should look. Now I can concentrate on cleaning the rest of the house. Did I ever mention, I hate to clean? I'm really bad at it, so I neglect things until I just can't stand it any more. A while back I had this brilliant idea that I would go around the house and make a list of all the jobs that needed doing ie. clean out pantry, clean kitchen baseboards, clean out my car, clean kitchen blinds, etc. Each job would be written on a piece of paper and be placed in a jar where the idea was I would pull a "job" once a week and complete that job. After completed, that piece of paper would go into another jar. Once all the jobs were done I would start again by pulling jobs out of the second jar. Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, I thought about this at least three years ago and so far nothing has been done about it.

If you are a regular reader of my blog you can probably guess why this hasn't happened. If I have the time, what do you think I would rather do? Clean or Shop? Right, shop. That usually wins out. Even over crafting which I also love to do. I usually do just about anything else, watch tv, read, blog, etc. before I will spend time cleaning. I don't know how my husband puts up with me, but he does. I know my messy habits drive him crazy and he has even suggested we get a cleaning person, but I won't have a stranger in my house who may or may not steal my stuff. And, as you all know, I have a lot of stuff. What's a girl to do? I know, lets go shopping.

Isabel and I did go shopping at the flea market I mentioned in my last couple posts. I guess I thought, well, if I can't sell there, I might as well shop. I thought I could talk to the organizer to find out why she didn't call me back. As it turned out, there were a lot of empty tables which made me kind of upset. What I found out after asking was that they were booked up, but the bad weather? caused some people to not be able to come. I couldn't find the organizer, but was told that she gets a lot of calls and does not have the time to call everyone back. So I said, "if I don't get a call back I can assume that there aren't any spaces available?" They said yes. Weird.

I did manage to find quite a few small items and a couple bigger items as well. We made a quick goodwill stop were I found some things too.

Right now is where I usually list everything I bought, but you can see it here in the pic. Go ahead and click on it to get a better detailed view. Nothing in this picture was over $5.00 with most items being around $1.00- $3.00 each.

I found this chair at the flea market. It was a little more than $5.00, but I just love it. Of course it will receive one of my favorite make-overs, a new barkcloth seat.

I found this framed shelf thingy at Goodwill. It is painted a neat aqua color with a bit of gold. I couldn't get the picture to show the true color, but it was cute and interesting looking. Not sure if I will keep or try to sell just yet.

I'm not scheduled yet to work this week. I think I might go to the auction tomorrow with Joy though. I'm kinda broke now as my check from Monticello was a little puny, but it will be fun to watch Joy spend her money.

Two last things, went to see "Juno" which I loved. Such a well done movie, I think. And I have added some more pictures to my flickr thingy, so if you haven't taken a look in awhile or ever, please feel free to do so.


Sorry for the long and rambly post today. I guess I'm in a chatty mood. Hope everyone had a great weekend and here's to an awesome Monday!