The Thrift Store Swap

The THE THRIFT STORE SWAP is finally here! I know you’ve waited patiently… so let’s get started shall we? This swap was soooo much fun! I love re-purposing things and making them pretty again… so this swap was right up my ally. But can I tell you a secret? Shhh… don’t tell anybody!

** I was scared to join**

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That’s right, I was totally freaked out. I thought “what if someone sends me something and I don’t know what to do with it?!” When I work on projects by myself it’s easy… I come up with the inspiration and I work on what speaks to me. Now I have to work on something that speaks to someone else! Eeek!

We played a game of round robin to see who would send to who… and decided that I would send an item to Carolyn of CC McAfee Perspective… while the fabulous Tracy from At Home with Sweet T would be sending me a little something something.

Which is how I wound up with this fantastic round-about thingy…

You guessed it… I had no idea what to do! I stared at it for a while… Talked to my hubby about it (he thought I should make it into a projector for spinning pictures which was a crazy cool idea but waaaay too complicated!)… Then I placed it in the middle of my living room floor and stared at it as I walked by for a week.

Nope, still no inspiration.

I moved it to my mom’s house for a week and finally lugged it out to my new house… where I still had absolutely no idea what to do with it. I decided I would have to paint it… there was no way the yucky wood would be salvaged… but what could I do to the top that was new and exciting?

I thought about adding a decal and researched several french antique graphics… I even took a poll asking for your votes (and had a lot of great responses!) I thought I finally had a great idea but when I printed out the graphics NOTHING seemed to fit!

That’s when the lighting bolt hit… wallpaper samples. We had just gone through the wallpaper books at work and I had an entire box of expired wallpaper books sitting in my warehouse begging to be re-purposed! Wallpaper sample books come in gorgeous patterns and are just big enough to cover the top of my funny little round-about! (Side note: when I brought the round-about to work to look at the wallpaper books one of my employees thought it was a birdhouse… which I can see now would have been an excellent re-purpose!)

I looked through the wallpaper books and found a pattern that matched my Sherwin-Williams Bracing Blue paint color perfectly… and then it was off to the races!

I attached my wallpaper sample with a bit of border adhesive (don’t worry I’ll walk you through that in a separate post!) and the angels started singing! I can’t BELIEVE how much I love the end result!

After the paint had dried and the wallpaper was glued the final step was adding pictures. I originally wanted to add wedding pictures (of course!) but I could not find my printed wedding pictures anywhere!!!

What I did find was a mixture of college photos, ski trip memories, a day at the beach from spring break and a sleepover with my best friend from high school. While the wedding pictures would have been gorgeous it was kind of the expected response… I feel like newlyweds use wedding pictures for everything. Don’t get me wrong I LOVE my wedding pictures but it was nice to take a break from the wedding and use memories. I love looking at all the good times! Go on… take a look for yourself!

If you loved the swap as much as I did I’m sure you’re wondering what the other ladies have come up with! Check out what Carolyn of CC McAfee Perspective did with the items I sent her… or go backwards and see what Tracy from At Home with Sweet T received! I know Tracy was having a hard time coming up with ideas as well… I can’t wait to see what she ended up with!

Of course if you’d like to see what the whole gang was doing you can make the full rounds: