Here’s a special Christmas treat! If you are a dullard, a grinch, a scrooge, or a violent felon, you may have been left off of the holiday greeting card list. Everyone’s holiday greeting card list. You sad sack of potatoes! Don’t fear! I’ve made some holiday cards for you to enjoy and use to pretend you have friends. Have a looksy!:
I hope by this day you’ve got all your gifts made or bought because if you have a JoAnn’s Fabrics trip to make yet, Lord help you. You don’t want to see the coupon hoarding and dented ornament grabbing that’s going on there. JoAnn would not be be pleased.
Turn around. Every now and then I get a little bit awesome at creating orname-eh-eh-ehnts. Turn around. Every now and then I get a little bit awesome at maaaking kickass glitter roBOTS! Turn around! Every now and then I go on k-razy binges and do nothing but make cool ornaments! TURN AROUND! Every now and I make a stuffed bird from felt and then I see the joy in my neice’s eyes!
Turn around, Santa.
EVERY NOW AND THEN I AM THE BEST!
Turn around, Martha.
EVERY NOW AND THEN I AM THE BEST!
Guys, I found my hot glue gun! Annie got her gun. Maaaa ha.
I had a sneaking suspicion it was in our storage room, but to get there, I have to go outside and down creepy steps and into a musty dark room that may or may not be a huge cardboard condominium space for mice, and I just wasn’t in the mood, thankyouverymuch, to venture down there. But after some time (it was a full week) of trying to use inferior glue for my projects, I mustered up the courage and charged on over, making sure to bring a thwapping stick to ward off any potential critters. I came back with my gun PLUS a folder of old collages I made. I am excellent at making collages. But never mind that. On with the show!
The return of my old pal Glue Gun inspired me to make some awesome holiday ornaments for my fam and friends. Tree ornaments make excellent gifts for the following reasons:
If you’ve noticed that the only food group in your diet lately has been Free Pasta Salads, don’t worry. It’s not a covert conspiracy between macaroni salesmen and Midwestern moms to take over the world. Alright, it is, but it’s also graduation party season. And in your mayonnaise dressing haze, you may have forgot that in exchange for the free food, you need to bring a gift for the recent graduate (if you’ve crashed the party and are having trouble picking the grad out of a crowd, look for the one giving off the ‘frightened and aimless’ vibe, usually characterized by nervous laughter and a constant darting of the eyes).
Although you are probably broke and your biggest gift to them is a human representation of life choices they should avoid, you should still put some thought into a present for them. As always, I’m here to bail your ass out. Here are some ideas:
I found this vintage pill case at a yard sale a few years ago. I love the flowered pattern on the front of the case and the trippy circles on the back:
It reminds me of something one of Don Draper’s girlfriends might carry around in her clutch. Of course it would probably be filled with some sort of barbiturate to be taken at martini o’clock whilst lounging on a fainting couch, but it’s still classy looking. Sort of.
Happy birthday again blog! Thriftfulness turns two today! By this age, my blog should have a longer attention span, begin learning new words rapidly, and start hiding behind the couch when it poops.
To celebrate, I’m going to eat macaroni and cheese and apply for jobs, but as a special birthday gift for YOU, dear reader, I’m posting a little book excerpt from the would-be-a-book-if-I-could-manage-to-not-get-rejected version of Thriftfulness. Not interested? Scroll down to the bottom of the post anyway for a list of what’s to come in year 3 of the blog. Will she have a thrifty wedding? Find new treasures in the Free Box? Finally make that damn diorama? Learn to jump rope?
As any self-respecting lady of leisure (read: unemployed) would, I have become the recent owner of a cat. Her name is Barbara Ann. We call her Barb.
Barb grew up in a trailer park for cats just off of the express-way. At least, that’s where we found her. From what I can gather, her mother ditched family and friends to run off with a tom-cat who had briefly struck it rich while filing his claws on a lottery ticket that had fallen onto the sidewalk from someone’s pocket. Drifters like him seldom stick around and this tabby was no different. He was long gone by the time the litter arrived. Hearing he’d run off to California, Barb’s mother decided to name her new fatherless kittens after Beach Boys songs: Barbara Ann, Rhonda, Surfer Girl, Kokomo, and Good Vibrations, which held sort of a double meaning for Barb’s mom.
A couple of years ago, when I was living in Chicago, I spent a Sunday afternoon strolling the neighborhood garage sales and buying as much as I could carry back to my house for as much money as I had in my pocket which was/is never more than $11. I spend a lot of Sunday afternoons doing this and, since I’ve recently become unemployed, I imagine I’ll spend a lot of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons doing it too. But on this particular Sunday, on a tiny corner of a picnic table, was a dirty plastic bag of film negatives with no price-tag. The garage salesman didn’t even look like he recognized them, so he gave them to me for free. It slightly resembled the scene from “Little Shop of Horrors” when Seymour finds Audrey 2. Da doo.
Shang da doo.
Robert Downey Jr. described families best in one of my favorite movies, Home For The Holidays:
“You’re a pain in my ass. You have bad hair. But I like you a lot.”
Our relatives are “eccentric”, but we love them and we’d like to make them happy this holiday season. Here’s a list of quick and cheap (and last minute!) gift ideas for that bat s@%! crazy group of people we call family:
Thriftfulness 