Hello friends,

I just wanted to check in since I have been quiet a couple of weeks (I try to post every week). I have only done one craft project since Jiji and Lily, but I need to save it until after my next Thrift Tales entry, since it uses one of the items I have thrifted since the last post. I am happy to say my luck has been better this month.

Mostly what I have been working on is a project years in the coming. Ages ago I recognized the need to begin converting our old family photos to digital, so my husband gave me a nice archival quality photo scanner for my birthday. That was 2017. I have done some photo scanning here and there over the years, but I have only just recently begun to step things up. Spring fever usually compels me to handle a lot of longstanding projects, so here I am, making progress at last. It is very slow progress though. Each picture takes at least a couple of minutes.

Besides that I have been doing some rock tumbling. As I mentioned in my post on the NatGeo rock kit, I did recently get a rock tumbler which has been great fun for a rock nerd like me. I finished the initial set of rocks which came with my starter kit and I am now about halfway through tumbling a set of my own finds. They are turning out beautifully so far and I am looking forward to the finished results.

We also set up the new record player my husband gave me for Christmas. Long ago I thrifted a set of Disney albums and I was sad to find they were too damaged to enjoy playing. I did not really check them for scratches when I thrifted them since I did not own a record player anyway. I thought if they were scratched then I could just use them for a cool project – maybe try my hand at hot knifing? Besides those I have mostly passed on records while thrifting since I did not own a player, but now I can thrift those too. Yay!

I have tried my hand at a few things that will not make it to the blog for the forseeable future. I tried rock painting, but I am not much of an artist, so I have not enjoyed that as much as I would have thought. Rocks + crafting?! But oh, I have grumbled much here on my lukewarm feelings toward painting.

I also tried to make a downloadable template for DiY replacement View-Master reel sleeves as some of the reels from my recent View-Master haul were missing theirs. I found it easy enough to recreate the sleeve, but honestly I feel the design can be improved if you’re going to be making your own anyway, so I will wait until I can come up with an improved sleeve design.

Anyway, I hope you are staying warm. It is quite cold here in my neck of the woods and I am longing for spring weather. Feel free to tell me what types of projects you like to see in the comments below.

Cheers!