Etsy Favorite Friday!: Cat & Dog Salt and Pepper Shakers

It's amazing the things one finds on Etsy. Many people know that Etsy is an online marketplace for handmade items, but it also is a place where you can sell vintage items. ("vintage" is defined as anything 20 years or older). Earlier this month, a fellow RNEST team member created a vintage, dog-themed treasury that included a listing for a set of Cat & Dog Salt & Pepper shakers from the shop Lisa's RetroStyle...

Cute and Kitschy Cat and Dog Plastic Salt and Pepper Shakers

I saw the listing and gasped in surprise. I have that same set! (although in a bit more of a worn condition)

See?
It's one of those ridiculous moments where you realize that it had never crossed your mind that there could possibly be another set like the one you have! Mine is a bit of a private nostalgic family treasure. The story behind my set is that they were my great Aunt Carrie's (aka: Aunt Grandma). But she didn't use them as salt & pepper shakers...she kept them in the red, wooden toybox I used to raid when I came over to her house when I was little. And the cat & dog were some of my favorite things to play with! It was years before I even realized they were supposed to be salt and pepper shakers. You'd think the holes in the tops of their heads (in a "S" shape on the dog and in a "P" shape for the cat) would have tipped me off.

I still have the red toybox too. I used it for the background of these pictures. And I still keep toys in it for when my friends' kids come to play!

I've had these kind of selfishly hidden up in my craft room on a shelf, but I think I may start keeping them in the toybox like old times! I'll let a child enjoy them like I once did!

Polly & Me

During my visit to my grandma's house a few weeks ago, we were looking through this box of random photos, and I found these three pictures...

Yes, that blue-eyed baby is me! I had blue eyes for a long time when I was a baby, much to my mother's delight, who loves blue eyes and thought I would be dark haired with bright blue eyes. But then when I was two they changed to brown . Sorry Mom! I couldn't help it! I would have liked to have kept those lovely blue eyes too!

I have no idea how old I am in these (probably only a few months), but look who I'm hanging with! It's Polly Esther!

Even at such a young age, I loved my sock monkey!

I have a philosophy that every child needs a sock monkey. Until I started making my own plush toys, it was my go-to baby shower gift.

Link Roundup: I (heart) Wooden Toys!

I seem to be on a link-sharing kick lately.

Although I make plush toys...I also have a great love for simple, wooden toys. I've always said that blocks are the best. I remember building blocks being one of my favorite kinds of toys growing up.


Old Spools: New Blocks (image credit:Maya*Made)

I saw this huge collection of wooden spools today on the Maya*Made blog. I love, love, LOVE wooden spools! ESPECIALLY these vintage ones! I don't know what it is about them. And the fact that Maya has so many of them makes me drool! I actually just found 3 vintage wooden spools of my own today while cleaning my craft room. I think that brings my collection up to 5 or 6 of them. I have recently developed a thing for photos of vintage spools of colorful thread. I bought a print from Dear Machine on Etsy awhile back, as well as one from photographer Abby Try Again. Now that I've found some vintage wooden spools of my own, maybe I can wind some colorful thread onto them and take some pictures of my own!

Paper Doll Blocks (image credit: TinyGiraffe)

This is SUCH a good idea! I would love to make these as a gift for someone. The problem with paper dolls is that they are paper...which can be a fragile thing, especially in the hands of a young child. This is an idea I could "monster-fy" as well, using my own designs.


Block Mates (image credit: Guidecraft)

These are just cool. "Block mates cleverly transform ordinary unit blocks into animals and vehicles." I found this via Ohdeedoh (of course). I can't tell if these are wooden or plastic (and it doesn't say on the site), but either way they are pretty cool!

My First Christmas Gift...

There's a reason I have such a love for Sock Monkeys. This is picture of me sitting on Aunt Grandma's lap during my first Christmas (1982)...and guess what I have! My Sock Monkey, "Polly Esther"!

Every child needs a Sock Monkey! ;)

"Un-Toys"

A post on Apartment Therapy's kid blog Ohdeedoh sparked the memory of my favorite "un-toys" (things that aren't really toys that kids like to play with...like the classic empty cardboard box). Two of my favorite things to play with as a child were these two ceramic mice my mother had painted for me...a little boy mouse in overalls and a little girl mouse in a pink dress.


They were meant to be only for decoration, but I would play with them like they were little toy figurines. That's probably why they have chipped ears and feet now.

Other "un-toys" I enjoyed were bolsters, pillows, and blankets, which my brother and I would always use to make forts. (every kid knows blanket forts are the BEST!)

Handmade Christmas: Rayne's Felt Castle

The next couple blog posts will be about gifts I made for my nieces and nephew this year for Christmas.
I came across a blog post back in November about making a toy castle out of felt and carboard. I loved the idea and ended up making one for my youngest niece for Christmas...


She loved it...as I'm sure any little girl would. I know I would!

It was one of my most time-consuming handmade gifts (excluding the handwarmers I knitted for my other niece). I didn't really follow the Confessions of a Sewing Dork tutorial. That just gave me the inspiration and general idea of how to make it, and I just winged it from there. The tutorial is all hand sewn...I machine sewed mine, with a little bit of hand sewing.

I also made the doll. I hot glued on yarn for her hair and felt for her dress, and drew her face on with a Sharpie pen.

I decided to make a button closure in case she wanted to open it up and play with it...(as opposed to how the tutorial sewed all the sides together).

This has been one of my first attempts at making button holes with my sewing machine.

I like how the castle turnede out and want to make more now! Time to buy some grey felt by the yard!

Wooden Castle Building Blocks

If you walked into my house, sometimes you'd never know that we have no kids. I have a good supply of toys and children's books though, since lots of my friends have kids. Plus, the hubby and I are just big kids at heart. I found this block set while we were packing before moving to the new house. I found it still in my car this morning while looking for any stray soda bottles or cans to take to be recycled and gave it to my hubby to take inside. When I got home this is what I saw on the coffee table...

I don't quite remember where I got this awesome little set (but whenever I can't recall where I got something, I usually figure I got it at Goodwill back when I worked there). I also don't remember why I had it stashed away for so long! CJ said to me "Where has THIS been? YOu've been holding out on me!" Wooden building blocks are one of the most awesome and most classic toys of all time. We think this little set was handpainted, since the same pattern on some of the blocks looks slightly different...maybe a thinner or thicker line...different enough to know that it wasn't stamped.

The Curious Case of Brownie Bunny

After Christmas when Wal-Mart had Rubbermaid bins on sale for $5, I decided to try to organize our storage in "our" corner of the attic. While doing so, I came across my bin of select, childhood stuffed toys that have sentimental value to me. One such toy is Brownie...a little brown bunny rabbit that was one of my very favorite toys when I was little.

I've had him forever. And I think he was old when I got him. His head is filled with an old-school looking fiber filling and his body is full of beanie-type thingys. But sadly, as you can see, one of Brownie's eyes was chewed off. It's my own fault...my old room was a disaster area back when I lived in my parents' basement before I got married, and I didn't have Brownie in a safe place up off the floor...so the mice got to him, no doubt to obtain some bedding for their nests or something. (Just to let you know...before my mother gets upset at me for announcing to cyberspace that their house has mice...my parents have since fixed the mouse problem.)
Anyway...when I found Brownie last week, with that gaping hole where his right eye used to be, too sentimental for me to bear the thought of throwing him away, I decided to fix him. First I sewed up the hole...

Then I was going to give him a classic "X" eye with black embroidery thread (although I had the option of replacing both eyes with safety eyes) , but CJ made the suggestion of giving him an eyepatch. I thought it was a cute idea...so now Brownie looks like a Pirate Bunny...

Now I suppose I need to make him a little pirate shirt and give him a little cutlass! I know he still looks a little ratty (give him a break! He's probably over 20 years old!), but he's going to need to literally fall apart before I'll throw him away!