form before function.

I can already see that this is going to be a harder task than I originally envisioned. The blogging, that is. Not the crafts. All the free time in the world at the moment and I look at cat videos and knit.

Anyway. So I have this sister-in-law who is pretty brilliant at balancing work, raising three kids and finding amazing deals at junk shops. Oh, and she farms and cans all her own fruits and vegetables. She gets down with some Suzie Homemaker shit like no one I’ve ever met. So last year, at a garage/church/estate sale of some type, she happened to stumble upon this strange beauty:

Before. Totally before. After, however, the kitten learned to climb it.

It’s a vintage dress form, exactly what I had been looking for. And I’m pretty sure she got it for a buck.

Trent and I happen to like to punish ourselves by collecting things in many states of disrepair and decay that we ultimately find will take more time and money to fix than just buying new in the first place. That made this dress form even more perfect. It’s from the 1940’s-50’s, Fairloom brand produced by Sears, somewhat common to find on eBay and shopgoodwill.

Despite the fact that it kind of looks like hell in this photo, it was structurally pretty sound. These old dress forms are fully adjustable using wing nuts inside the form itself. I’ve discovered that it’s impossible to set it correctly, but it was still in pretty much perfect condition inside. The cardboard wasn’t even too torn up. The outside, however, was another story entirely, which you can see in these photos:

   

i’m new here, excuse the bad puns.

Hi there, and welcome to my craft blog. Chances are, you’ve stumbled here by some poor fortune on your part or it’s the future and I’ve completed something I wanted to share with people and you’ve gone backwards through my post history to find this. Either way, enjoy.

The idea here is that the boy-thing and I have had a productive summer, lots of repair and re-finish projects have sprung up. Mostly taken out of other people’s trash. We’ve learned a bunch of useful stuff like what kind of paint to use on rusty metals and that sometimes when people throw stuff away, they knew what they were doing and it probably should have stayed on the curb. We’ve also bored most of our friends and family with too much chatter about what we’re working on at the moment, so I thought I’d throw together a blog so I can release this energy into the blogosphere. I’ll be posting about my own projects, local crafts, things I love and starting a year-long sewing project I’ll explain later.

Anyway. I did a project this weekend I’ll be sharing in my next post to kick things off. Thanks for reading!