Christmas comes early

The thrift store gods continue to smile upon us—look what the Other spotted at our favourite shop this morning!

Are those taper legs? Yes! Is the stain a perfect match for this desk? Yes! Is the sewing machine that retro shade of aqua that I find so luscious? A thousand times yes!

While the table's not crucial furniture, I think I can modify the table to fit Gertrude, my more modern sewing machine, which would give me a nice flat surface. Gertrude's no looker, but she probably has to stay my workhorse machine.

On the other hand, the old Singer seems to work—I need to play with it a bit more—and it has such a big throat that I wonder if it might prove useful as well as lovely. And even if lovely turns out to be the Singer's only real quality, I think she's mighty cute.

So now I'm off to scour the Internet for a manual, clean her up a bit, and see what she can do.

If I weren't me, I'd be jealous of me

On a whim, the Other suggested we pop into a usually fruitless Goodwill yesterday. And look what we found! This saucy little coffee table is made of two pieces, joined with a peg, so that the lower surface can swing all the way around to make an L shape or a long table. Or it can be tucked underneath to save space and make a nice shelf for magazines and remote controls.

But that's not all! As we were rushing to get the table safely in our clutches, we spied one of the loveliest midcentury desks I've ever seen...

My apartment has always featured aqua and orange, so could it be more perfect? I'm criminally infatuated. The price tag left marks on the top, so I may need to refinish it, but the Other and I are already fighting over who gets to occupy the desk. Since I'm working from home now, it's obviously going to be me. (I shall have the most beautiful office/sewing room in all the land!) Felis Domesticus (that is, the Other's cat) has staked her own claim, basking on the desktop before the dust had even settled. She does know how to push my buttons—and she knows bloody well I can't spritz her with the water bottle if she's near delicate wood surfaces.

The cost for these two pieces? Less than $50 for the pair. (Plus taxi fare to haul the desk down the street—we looked ridiculous enough shuttling the table home on foot.) And both were pieces of furniture we kind of needed.

But that's still not all! The Other's had a set of dining chairs like this for a while:

Good, eh? I've always loved the pattern on the vinyl seats (click the photo for a closer look). Lo and behold, what did we find at an antique shop on Saturday?

Same pattern! Different colours, but given the Other's appreciation of flamingos and the like, the pink was perfect. There was a pair of the trays, so naturally we took them both home. Anybody know anything about the pattern's provenance?

We're probably moving apartments soon, so things aren't quite settled, but we're getting there. And I'm delighted to have a partner in crime to salivate over bargainous furniture with. (Watch for edits to the previous sentence if when we come to blows over the desk.)

Latest flea market finds

Wire shelves and magazine rack that will go nicely with the shelf just peeking out of the bottom of the picture here.

Lots of vintage fabric (more details on Flickr; click the pictures). The top one should make a nice tablecloth. The middle one will probably find its way into a quilt, as might the bottom, though I'm not sure how easy it will be to sew its odd waffly texture.

Foundation-pieced pillow

Okay, it's past my bedtime, but Minty kindly made a post about this here blog, and it seemed a shame for crazy batting hanging out of a quilt top to be the first thing people saw on the page. So here's a pillow I made a couple weeks ago. The print fabric came from Melinamade, which has some great stuff. The pillow belongs on my bed, but in this picture it's blending in a naugahyde chair I scored for $10!

Flea market finds

Flea market season is ending, and I just made it back with some good scores. This tea towel was $2! I liked the colors and the design of it, though I'm not quite sure what it's meant to be—is the queen a chess piece? And what on earth does "no yours" mean? May have to do some investigating. Whatever she's on about, this queen has an hourglass most of us can only aspire to. The squares are brill too and something similar could work for a quilt.

I've got a bunch of Queen Elizabeth II stuff in my bathroom, so the towel may live there, but I worry that might dilute the cultivated strangeness of abundant QE2 kitsch. Hmm.

I also picked up a couple of DIY furniture books from the seventies. How to Make Furniture Without Tools has instructions for lots of furnture made from single sheets of plywood, which might be useful if either 1) Lowe's could be trusted to make precise cuts, or 2) I had the space to do my own cutting. More immediately inspiring is Nomadic Furniture. The authors say that some of the projects predate the book by a good twenty years, so the designs run the midcentury gamut. The two tables below were a couple of my favorites from this book, but there has to be a moratorium on tables until I'm in an apartment with more floor space.

Suitcase table

I was flipping through Home Cheap Home (by the editors of the now-defunct Budget Living magazine) with the Other a while back and found the suitcase table project you see above. I've had this suitcase from my mum's middle school luggage for some time now (she had a bit of a tantrum at the time because she didn't get the matching train case, which her mother declared impractical), and I snagged these taper legs out of somebody's trash this summer.

This promised to be one of my quickest furniture projects to date, but typically, the bolts on the ends of the legs did not have a standard thread, so two trips to different hardware stores yielded no suitable nuts (har har, he said nuts). Eventually I just drilled through the suitcase, shoved the bolts through the holes, and sunk some screws into the legs to secure them. And it's lovely, no? The bangs and bruises just add to the history.

Of course, I've no more room for furniture. The table will hold my printer for now, Youngest Brother may inherit this little avocado number when he goes away to college, as I'm told he's planning a green and brown color scheme.