Skip to main content

5 "Thrift Store Find" DIY Craft Projects They Keep Showing, for Things You Haven't Been Able to Find at Thriftstores Since 1987.

Me love Pinterest.
I know it's all a big, fantastic lie, but like every other pretty magazine catering to our fantasies before it, it makes us feel like we can achieve the same, heavily worked-over, fantastically styled, filtered, and photo-shopped perfection in our own lives. And sometimes that's enough.

But as a professional builder of ridiculous, up-cycled things, and a veteran thrifter (I can show you the scars!), some of these Pinterest DIY are just a parade of despair, false promises and dashed hopes. There's no call for that.


1. Vintage Suitcase Crafts:

 Not only is this type of vintage suitcase VERY rare at your garden variety thrift store, follow this link to see how much rather highly involved work went into it.


Or this link to the more likely outcome



2. Stuff made with old "thrift store" silverware.



Here's what you'd hope to find:













Here's what you're most likely to find:
Oh, this stainless steel crap will bend alright--most of it already has the scars of the church community center garbage disposal and some cock-toothed nursing home fight--but it ain't pretty. Never will be. Move on.

3. Shit made out of old books. 
These old books--with their worn book-cloth covers and awesome typeset pages and illustrated plates are very, very rare at your garden variety thrift stores.
Of course, you're hoping to find a charming used bookshop like this: 
But more likely this is what you will find: 

And not that there's anything wrong with some good YA novels, cheesy romance novels, or embossed-cover thrillers, but you're just not going to be making those vintage-y bookmarks with old, timeworn spines, or cute, craftsy things like that. Trust me on this one.
Unless you find a box of silverfish-infested, moldy books in someone's leaking shed, you probably won't want to tear "curious and rare" books apart for your crappy attempts at "crafty-ness".

4) Stuff made with wooden thread spools.          Seriously--what year do you think it is? When was the last time you bought a spool of thread? They haven't used wooden spools since the 1960's! These pictured here are as rare (and as expensive) as unicorn shit.  (I have a few DIY projects using Unicorn Shit...)                                  Honestly, when did any of these craft-DIY-ers go to an actual thrift store?? ( I just found a box of 15 wooden spools for $50 at a fancy schmancy antique store. The thread is so old, it's dry-rotted and absolutely useless--so those are some expensive Christmas crafts).        No wonder people would rather scroll through Pinterest than actually make the things on Pinterest.

5) Crap made from old furniture: 
First of all, it's very hard to just pop into a thrift store and find good, solid wood stuff like this:

That someone like you hasn't already mucked up trying to paint and turned into an incredibly uncomfortable bench. (I have one that I made!)

Most of what you'll find is that greasy-surfaced laminate/particle board crap that is just badly proportioned, cheaply made and if it's not already delaminating, it's just so friggin' tricky to paint. And, if you do manage to get paint to stick to it, it will look like that greasy-surfaced, cheap laminate/particle board crap that you tried to paint in some vomitous color of "Fleckstone" or other novelty type of spray paint.

Trust me on this: you will end up spending $50 dollars on the greasy-surfaced laminate crap, $50 on spray paint and a priceless amount of time and aggravation and it will end up on the curb for one of your neighbors to pick up thinking, "hey...with just a coat of paint I could make something gorgeous..." (6 weeks later you will see it five blocks away in a new vomitous shade of spray paint. That may be your form of entertainment. In which case...I have this old bed frame you can buy...)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Lost Designer of the 80's

Claude Barthelemy seems to have been one of those if-you-needed-to-ask-you-didn't-need-to-know designers. In the '80's, he was listed as a young, hot couturier alongside go-the-distance blue chips like Karl Lagerfeld and Lanvin with his oversized sweaters, minis, leggings and fur-trimmed stoles. Exclusive stores carried his soft-edged jackets to shoppers in the know. And then what happened? His pleated skirts, intarsia sweaters, and naughty, zippered wool catsuits still fetch high prices in vintage world and any dealer with his elegantly simple, Gallic tag on her racks raises a flutter in second-hand seekers. He designed for Barbie, for heaven's sake! But the designer himself, who seems to have cut a meteoric swath across the runways and then...? So what's the story with this wasp-waisted pleated skirt? I wondered what else this woman could have dropped off on her Goodwill drive-by--a Chanel original? A couture Pucci? Surely someone this linked in wouldn't just

Change Your Tone!!

I know I have a "unique voice." But I can count on one hand how many people I know who can stand listening to their own voice. (That is not saying there aren't those guys who seem to love talking just to hear the sound of their own voice; but if you literally  played it back to them --they'd cringe and crawl under the sofa.) When I was in the 3rd grade, I was chosen to be in some experimental speech/voice therapy at our school. They tried for many weeks to raise the pitch of my voice by having me go up and down the do-re-mi scales until I hit one that they thought sounded pleasing. I had a deep, true contralto voice somewhere a few notes below "do." With the sort of rasping, old-chain-smoker undertones of a freckled Billie Holiday. The experimenters settled on "fa." For 20 minutes three times a week, I got to leave Ms. Foster's third grade classroom and go to the convent living room where I would sing "do-re-mi-fa" and say

E is for Ephemera--The Beauty of the Impermanent #A2ZChallenge

Ephemera Vulgata (garden variety Mayfly) Ephemera: From the Greek: Ephemeron --a short-lived insect. Members of the family Ephemeridae include dragon and damsel flies as well as may flies in the genus Ephemera. For the rest of us: the detritus of our lives: concert tickets, bus tokens, valentine's day cards, matchbooks, packaging, coupons: objects meant to be useful for a brief period of time. And then what? Advocates of simplicity say it should be thrown away. I have tried.   But I don't think they're looking close enough. Simply because it is not meant to be durable doesn't mean much of it isn't a tiny window into some artist's mind. I am not ashamed to say I buy many things based on the cleverness or beauty of its packaging. I consider this a way of supporting the arts--manufacturers paid someone to design the structure, the image, the lettering. It may not be as grand and sweeping as an operatic performance, but the opera itself is ephe