A Day in the Life of...

Another day of errands and general chaos. This morning I took Wickham to the groomer, then raced home to package and ship Etsy orders. After lunch I drove to town to run more errands and fill a prescription, only to realize after arriving at the pharmacy that I'd left the script at home. Oh, dear.

It wasn't a total loss, though, because I did get to the store to pick up some milk, yogurt, and a few other items we were out of, and I also took a quick run through the local Goodwill, where I found a yard of a very pretty Christmas novelty print cotton fabric. It's dated 1996, so it's not truly "vintage", but it's quite nice and I'm glad I found it. One doesn't usually see Christmas fabric in royal blue.

Yesterday while my sister-in-law and I were out and about, I found a couple of fun vintage goodies. One was a box of vintage Christmas cards, and the other was this nifty little telephone timer.

The little hourglass is embedded in a block of lucite. I haven't timed it yet, but I'm guessing it's designed to measure about 3 minutes, to help mid-century callers to keep track of those expensive long-distance phone charges. Or maybe to keep the teenagers from monopolizing the family land line, which would have been the only phone line back then. It's a cute little gadget.

Speaking of fun phone gadgets, here's another I have, still in its original package:

 Isn't it nifty? I love stuff like this. Some day I may even open it and affix it to my own rotary dial telephone. It's another souvenir of a memorable day out at the antique stores with my sister-in-law!

It looks a little "greeny" in this lighting, but it's actually a classic mid-century aqua.

 I love dialing the rotary phone--it's so very satisfying in a tactile sense, and I love the sound it makes as the dial moves around and back. It makes me feel so Barbara Stanwyck-like as in her classic film Sorry, Wrong Number. And it's always a perverse source of fun when some Generation X-er asks to use the phone and I point them to this classic. It's amazing how challenging they find it. It makes me feel much better about not knowing how to "text" or  troubleshoot my computer or use a Blackberry.

Tomorrow promises to be another cram-packed day, so once again it will be a short post. But I do have plans (hopes, rather!) to do a couple of tutorials again quite soon, so bear with me.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with this, which I found on Pinterest. What a good idea for using one's Fiskar's scalloped punch tool. I'll bet doilies would be very pretty, too! (It came from suelipinheiro.blogspot.com, which is an interesting-looking blog, but not written in English.)  I see pretty package trims being created tonight!