A deal...more like a STEAL!

Mikasa votives -- the whole batch cost a quarter!

Last week my neighbor called and told me the local party rental company was having a "garage sale" at their warehouse downtown.  It was a day I was working, but luckily we got slow in the afternoon and I was able to get off early, head down there and see exactly what they were getting rid of. The call of a good deal is a siren song to me, almost as much as good wine. Usually less expensive, too!

I found three decent tablecloths (the fancy linen kind event producers use) at four dollars each, in white, black and brown.  The black one will need a patch, but the other two are perfect the way they are. I also picked up five Mikasa crystal votive holders (25 cents for all five).

Love these -- and check out the $4 tablecloth to the right!

And the steal of the century was these wooden folding chairs for two dollars each.  I bought sixteen!

So after feeling like a total deal glutton, I headed home and am going to begin refinishing the chairs this week.  Since the white seats are that awful leather-look plastic, perhaps best known for making the backs of your legs always stick to them if you happen to be sitting in a short skirt or some shorts, I am recovering them with fabric scraps I've saved over the years. That should increase the color factor and decrease the "ouch" factor considerably.

 So every chair will have a different fabric bottom.  Since the seat of these chairs remove super-easily, this will be a very easy part of the project.

Colorful seating

The other thing I've decided is that after some sanding, I'm going to paint each chair black, using chalk paint or some other kind of matte paint. The black should really set off the colors on the seats, and will also make them look both elegant and funky.

I can't wait to host some outdoor dinners this year and use these chairs, and I'm so happy they were able to come home with me and start a whole new life.

I can't guarantee what kind of asses were sitting in them at the hundreds of weddings they probably attended, but all the ones here are pretty cool, so I like to think they've found a good home.

Art for whose sake?

Even if you're too young to remember, you probably realize there was a time when art was incorporated into many areas of American's day to day lives, and the world our grandparents inhabited was more beautiful because of it.  The coffee mug above is printed with a reproduction of an old fruit crate label.  Crate labels were beautiful art -- today they are collector's items, and you find them (or larger art replicas of them) framed and matted, hung in people's homes.  Or on coffee mugs, and who knows what else.


Somehow, I don't think today's packaged food artwork will ever adorn someone's wall as a piece of art.  A Keebler Elves logo on a coffee mug?  A Kellogg's Fruit Loops box lovingly reproduced and hung in a living room?  Nope, I just don't see it.  The same way courthouses no longer are built with winding steps and copper ceilings, with graceful murals adorning the chambers and gargoyles standing watch from high places.  When a nation loses its desire to make industry, commerce and government beautiful, does that make it lose its soul? Or does it cease doing those things because its already lost its soul?