Happy Halloween

This year’s Halloween display includes some thrifted decor…a tree with vintage ornaments, jack-o-lanterns with battery operated tea lights, and a few other tricks and treats. We also projected onto a sheet in one of our front windows to create the illusion of ghosts moving around inside. …and I made a Halloween candy catapult for socially-distanced distribution of candy. My trunk-or-treat theme this year was time flies…which seemed poignant for nearly a year of dealing with the ongoing pandemic…because we are all wishing it will fly by and everything will get back to normal ASAP.

Halloween Dollhouse

I’d been planning to turn my childhood dollhouse into a Halloween dollhouse…because I LOVE Halloween, and admittedly, it has seen better days. However, at the History Center garage sale, I stumbled across another house in far worse shape and in much need of a fabulous Halloween makeover -and thus began a month-long project to create a Halloween dollhouse.

Tea with Teddy

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This month, for book club we are reading “Mornings on Horseback” By David McCullough – about the early years of Theodore Roosevelt. The thrifted finds include a recently discovered vintage suitcase (which looks great together with some of the treasured ones I inherited from my grandparents – or on its own). The globes are all thrifted as well, as are the books, and hats, bird print, and tea-cup.

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Festive 500 Decor

Over the course of the past year, I’ve been thrifting things related to the Indy 500. Since I do most of my thrifting in Indianapolis, I’ve actually stumbled upon a few finds. I’ve found a few items since May and I suppose that one of the upsides of the pandemic is that I got to use these for decor on Memorial day weekend and today (the date that the 104th Indianapolis 500 ends up being run due to the COVID-19 related delay).

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A fun and festive display of vintage and race-related finds to celebrate the Indy 500.

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The toy race cars were a fun way to evoke the race in this display.

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Fake flowers and checkered contact paper add a pop of color and flair.

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Postcards, museum tickets and garage passes add color among collectible glasses from 1972 and 1973.

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A vintage bottle of 7-Up from 1979 tops the display. It even still has the original contents intact inside!

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With the exception of the vintage race lap counter (a race heirloom handed down to my husband from his grandmother), everything else shown in thrifted…including the full, and incredibly not disgusting looking, bottle of 7-Up, the set of 5 souvenir glasses from 1973 (extra cool because that was the year I was born), as well as a similar, yet slightly smaller one from 1972. The postcards, passes and ticket stubs were also thrifted, as was the stand, the vases, the tablecloths and the faux flowers. I found the black and white contact paper recently, and it made a perfect table topper and insert for the top of the cake stand.  Here’s to the 104th running of the Indy 500!

Puzzles and Games

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Above: 3 vintage puzzles. Two ended up missing only one piece after a whole lot of digging  in the bins; one was complete!  I’d previously sworn off puzzles, but I’m glad I took a chance this time around.

Below: a cool old-fashioned looking Card Game Deck, which I assumed was Mille Bornes – and it is, more or less, but there was apparently a version called “Touring” that was released in 1926.  I don’t know if I found the whole deck because the cards were scattered across several different bins, but I found what looks to be a similar number as another vintage Mille Bornes deck that I have.

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Below: Anything that’s old catches my eye, but I typically try to stay away from things that have personal info…unless they look like they were burned. This set includes a birth certificate, divorce decree, marriage certificate for Martha Beaudin and the death certificate for her third husband, Basil P Babcock, in 1956.  It was a stack of papers that told the story of someone’s life…and it made it all the more mysterious that someone had tried to burn them but failed, or interesting that they somehow had been rescued from a fire.

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