Easy wall art: Framed vintage animal puzzle

Some months ago, my husband brought home this animal puzzle from his parents' house in a box of things from his youth. The box also included a bunch of (worthless) baseball cards and a collection of "cassingles" from the early 90s. This puzzle was undoubtedly the best thing in the box.

It's so weird. None of the animals are to scale and about half of them are just heads. I put it together, and it took me a long long time. Seriously, like over an hour. It's crazy hard!

There is no hope for any child ever being able to put it together, so framing it for display seemed to be the best way to enjoy it.

I grabbed a thrift store frame from my stash that seemed to fit the proportions best. Then I went hunting for a suitable background. The frame is about 14 inches wide which ruled out a lot of the patterned papers I had on hand. I ended up painting a piece of brown kraft paper with some watered down craft paint just to give it a bit of color. I think the washed watercolor look gives it some extra interest.

It took some fancy maneuvering and a few tries, but I was able to sandwich it between the backing and the glass without using any glue or adhesive. Easy disassembly should we ever want to just play with the puzzle again.

My two favorite moments in this crazy scene are the whale and frightened green octopus (in the above photo) and the dove's head in the wolf's mouth (below). Cuckoo, right?

Framing found object: Psychic ad postcard

Years ago, I was kind of obsessed with "finding things" (a la Found Magazine). Basically, I would pick up every random piece of paper on the ground, hoping it would be something funny or interesting. Mostly, what I found was completely ordinary and uninteresting.

So when this postcard appeared on the sidewalk in front of me while walking out of work one day, I felt like I had finally won the lottery. I stopped and looked around to see if someone might have dropped it, but it was apparent it had appeared out of nowhere. I like to think the wind blew it out of the walls of an old building being rehabbed across the street.

I'm not really into the psychic thing (though I did have my palm read once upon a time in New Orleans), but stylistically, this is right up my alley. I love how the $1 price is scratched out (on the left), the kooky layout and all the old school fonts. It's almost like someone put this card out just for me to find.

Recently, I ran across it again going through some papers, and I knew I had to give it a proper display. I grabbed a picture frame from last month's trip to the Goodwill Outlet and introduced the strawberry print to the recycle bin.

I was going to paint the frame black, but something about the wood tone coordinated with the aging paper of the postcard. I decided to leave it as is. The backing pattern is a piece of scrapbook paper, and I just sandwiched it all together. My favorite way to frame! No adhesive!

Weird coincidence: Watching Pretty in Pink

The other night, we were watching Pretty in Pink. Can you believe my film blogger husband had never seen it? Anyway, we were near the end of the movie, watching the montage of Molly Ringwald re-fashioning the two dresses into something new to wear to the prom. Cut to Andrew McCarthy sulking in his bedroom and bam! Do you see it?

Maybe not since our poster is so faded. (Yes, that golden color was once red, if you can believe it!) There it was -- the exact same poster we have framed next to our TV on our TV screen! From an Edward Hopper exhibit in 1981. Weird, huh?

I found a hidden note!

I cannot believe I forgot to include this in my post about our bedroom's repainted register. (Well, yes I can. I've been forgetting everything lately.)

After I removed the register cover, I found this little slip of paper in the vent covered in dust bunnies. Who knows how many years it's been there. Oh Amber, such violence!

A trip to the Pink Elephant Antique Mall

I try to keep this blog on-topic and don't usually write "hey, look where we went" type of posts. But... um... hey, look where we went this past Saturday!

The Pink Elephant Antique Mall in Livingston, Illinois! It's on I-55, not quite an hour north of St. Louis. Sure, a visit to an antique mall isn't so off-topic for this blog, but the big draw here isn't the antique mall; it's all the roadside oddities.

(Elise calls the big man "Superman" for some reason. I'll admit he does look a bit Clark Kent-ish.)

The antique mall itself was pretty average. A lot of "smalls," not too much furniture. A lot of "junk," not really fine antiques. (Junk is what I prefer anyway.) The prices were pretty comparable to other antique malls I've visited, which is to say some things are overpriced, but there are also bargains to be had.

We did bring home a couple of items:

This mini metal mailbox bank. It's about nine inches tall.

And a souvenir Disney World book from the 80s that somehow my husband didn't already own.

After shopping, we sampled some ice cream from the shop outside and Elise had her first cone to herself. (Usually, we share, but this was holding off lunch. Don't judge.)

I would totally stop by again if we were in the neighborhood. It's a great photo opp, if you like taking photos of weird stuff like I do. And the ice cream is pretty good too!

More info on the Pink Elephant roadside attractions at Roadside America.

Glass, glass and more glass: More backyard finds

I mentioned before that I've found shards of glass in our backyard. Every time I dig a hole to plant something, I unearth some. And every time it rains, I can expect to find a few new pieces exposed on the surface of the dirt. I actually challenge myself to find at least two or three pieces every time I'm in the backyard. 

Maybe that's silly, but I would feel terrible if Elise got a hold of a piece and cut herself. She's a tight-fisted clutcher of small objects, and I can picture her grabbing a shard and slicing her little hand. Ouch!

Honestly, I thought I'd gotten most of it as my hunts produced fewer and fewer specimens.

But then... I hit the mother lode and dug up so much glass it filled a plastic dish tub. The source was in the back corner of our lot, likely our property's personal landfill from back in the day. I kept digging until I couldn't find any more, but after many hours, I was done with dirt for a while and cordoned off an adjacent area for future exploration.

More backyard treasures

With all the yardwork we've been doing, we've been uncovering a lot of treasures (trash?). Our house is 81 years old, so it's anyone's guess what might be lurking under the surface of the dirt. In some cases, I couldn't even get a shovel down more than a few inches without hitting something.

It's been kind of like a treasure hunt/excavation site, and although it's worthless junk, it's still kind of fun. All of you with newer houses, apartments and condos are going to be totally jealous by the end of this post.

Concrete, concrete and more concrete, mostly in small chunks. This is just the beginning. What I've found so far probably would fill a five-gallon bucket and there's more to be found for sure. I've also found lots of crumbling terra cotta pavers and some broken bricks.

And then there's the treacherous stuff.

More glass shards than a toddler's backyard should contain...

This photo is completely unstaged. Really!

And a rusty saw blade.

And then there's the big stuff...

A three-foot length of cast iron pipe

A huge chunk of concrete (lower left) and a two to three foot piece of a concrete curb. I suspect there's another piece down there, but I was too lazy to dig it out that day.

And a few more interesting things...

A ceramic beer bottle stopper, a white hexagonal tile (weird because this was not the original tile in our bathroom) and a decaying rubber ball.

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See some of the other weird things I found in my backyard last year.

My Weird Backyard

Our backyard has been long neglected. Definitely for longer than we've lived here, so I don't feel totally guilty about how it looks. More on that in a later post.

My dad surprised me this weekend by cleaning out some recurring vegetation and found a couple of "treasures."

 

The first is a poured concrete basin, two to three feet in diameter. Small bits of it were sticking up above ground, but we had no idea what it might turn out to be. I guess someone long ago had a decorative fish pond flanked by an assortment of geodes, which we have found in abundance. Classy.

The second is an old leather dog collar, caked with dirt, the tag reading "Puddy." I'm not sure when it is from, but it was after the advent of area codes. Also, I'm not sure if any of you have looked at a map recently, but Massachusetts is nowhere near Missouri. This doggie was a long way from home.

Finding this collar is funny and slightly worrisome because a couple of months ago I found a nylon cat collar in approximately the same location. It was more modern than this one. I figured some cat passing through snagged it on a tree and it broke away (as cat collars are designed to do). Now I'm not sure what it was doing there.

I really, really hope we are not the owners of a pet cemetery.