A while back I decided that my friend Meggan must have a PhD in thrifting. She definitely has a knack for finding great stuff at the thrift store, so I call her the thrift doctor.  If you don’t remember the tour of her home, you can find that here.

A couple of years ago she also shared some fun ideas with us for both holiday decorating and gift giving with thrifted items.

Meggan’s favorite nearby thrift store, Arc’s Value Village on White Bear Avenue, closed up shop over a year ago.  That was a bummer because we used to get together a bit more regularly for Thrifty Thursdays.  The shop was only a few miles from my house, so we’d head over there and spend the evening roaming their aisles.

Not only did the store close, but on top of that, COVID happened.  So Meggan and I hadn’t been out thrifting in quite some time.  But last Friday I took some time off at the day job, and we headed across the cities to the Richfield and Bloomington Value Village locations.

I just had to laugh when I woke up to snow falling on Friday.  Good grief, it was only October 23.  But I should have know better.  Meggan and I have a standing joke that any time we plan a thrifting outing the weather turns bad.  Usually we end up with either snow or sub-zero temps.  Fortunately this time it was just the snow.

I have to confess, there weren’t any really earth shattering finds.  But I did come home with a nice pile of goodies …

I’ve already given a few of them a makeover, starting with that pair of framed floral prints.

Those flowers kinda give me the creeps.  They definitely look like they could be poisonous, don’t they?  I also really don’t like that band of red around the inner side of the frame.  What’s up with that?

I was inspired to pick these up after seeing a recent blog post by Miss Mustard Seed though.  Maybe some of you saw it?  She posted about framing old pieces of paper (check it out here if you haven’t seen it).  So I thought these frames would work really well for that.

So after painting the frames in Dixie Belle’s Midnight Sky (to get rid of the red) and adding a topcoat of clear wax, I pulled out some old papers and photos to see what I could come up with.

The old postcards I used are not family history, I purchased them at an estate sale.  So I’m not defacing family heirlooms or anything.  The photos are old family photos, but they are the ones where no one was able to identify the people in them when we went through them a few years back.

I also added a few Tim Holtz rub-on’s to my collages (the insects and other wording).

I’ve also given the wooden arrow sign a new look for the holidays.  After painting it in Dixie Belle’s Drop Cloth, I combined a few different stencils from Maison de Stencils to add some wording.

I also painted the little stool using Dixie Belle’s Drop Cloth.  Then I added some Honky Tonk Red, followed by a Classic Vintage Label from re.design with prima.

I also revamped a couple of other items I found on Friday, but they became part of another project that I’m sharing later this week.

And of course, some of the items will just be sold on ‘as is’, like the little hammered aluminum dish.

I’m not especially a fan of hammered aluminum, but I know there are collectors out there.  And this one was so sweet I had to grab it.

This shape of this silver sugar bowl really appealed to me as well …

Even with its slightly wonky lid and a monogrammed ‘R’, I had to have it.  Who cares whether your name begins with an ‘R’, right?

And finally, I also couldn’t pass up the tiara.

I already have one on Cossetta, the statue in my garden …

But you just never know when you might need another tiara, right?