My Vintage Kitschen

My crafty pal Rachel Hobson is amazing. She’s a talented crafter, a great mom, and an all-around NICE person. She’s also a great gift giver – take a look at this…

Rachel just sent this to me in the mail today. I adore it. It’s supposed to be for my revamped craft room, but I feel like it might need to live downstairs for all to see… Tough choice!

This isn’t the first great gift Rachel has sent me. She made this “Totally RAD” sampler for me this summer, too. I still can’t get over the day-glo aida cloth!

Thanks, Rach

My fabulous friend Katherine sent me a treat in the mail, something not too shocking when it comes from your college pen pal of 10 years. Knowing what I do for a living, Katherine thought these paper tweets from Knock Knock Press would be a good fit for me. They definitely are.

We’ve made it! Our house is… officially old!

I grew up in Birmingham and was obsessed with history. I always wanted to know how old all the homes were and quizzed my grandma about the houses around us. I served on the Historic District Commission as a high school student, so I learned quickly that if you wanted folks to know the age of your house, you always wanted a committee to vote on any project you took on at your house.

Color me VERY surprised when I found out that Royal Oak offers historic markers through the Royal Oak Historical Commission. Any building that’s 50 years or older qualifies. Our house was built in 1926, so we made the cut!

We just picked up the plaque and we can’t wait to put it up on the front of the house.

WOW! I was so speechless today when I got the mail – I received a wonderful surprise from my dear friend Rachel Hobson after her trip to the Kennedy Space Center for the final STS launch, STS-135.

If you’re not already a fan of Average Jane Crafter, you need to be! Rachel is the biggest of biggest space dorks I know, and that’s a huge honor. She’s a passionate advocate for our country’s space program, so this final launch meant quite a deal to her. She also had the high honor of being a winner of the Etsy/NASA Space Craft Contest this year. Her amazing high-texture embroidery of the moon won her top honors and I had the privilege of seeing her work on it firsthand. A photo of her piece was sent in to space ON STS-135 – dang, right? As part of the contest Rachel got to go to the final launch and immerse herself in everything space-y. A perfect, perfect fit for her!

I’m very honored to receive this envelope. We’ll be framing it here at our house and adding a Lego space minifig to it, another favorite of Rachel’s. It’s only fitting!

Thank you, Rachel!

I hate the “Hey, blog! It’s been forever since I updated!” posts I see across the blogosphere. I don’t know why, but I do. When I thought about this blog, I worried that I’d have to do a post like that. But, let’s be honest – I abandoned this blog. On purpose. I found it too hard to keep this up with everything else I do. When Tumblr became the next must-have for self-proclaimed social media elites, I went there and switched to photo posting only. If you haven’t checked out Tubmlr in a while, you’ll be surprised (maybe?) to know that it’s a porn/spam heaven. Which is sad. But all this is besides the point.

Today I’m coming back to this blog. I’ll be shutting down my Tumblr this summer and streamlining my online activity all right here, folks, thanks to my great pal, Dan Nixon. I found what I’ve been missing in my blogging is a spot for my thoughts on whatever. Sometimes I have extra photos from a Craft post I do – those will be here. Sometimes I might talk about a Handmade Detroit funny instance – those thoughts will be here. Sometimes I’ll take a picture of something funny or something that inspires me – those will be here. Dan and I will be working on a new look for this ol’ WordPress blog in the coming months, which I’m so excited about. It’s exciting, in that Internet-nonsense kind of away.

So… yeah!