Vintage Spice and Epsom Salts Tins!

I was roaming around a flea market recently and came upon some shelves of old rusty tins of food items and pharmaceutical items.

I love the old packaging and fonts on spice tins and goodies from the medicine cabinet. I even remember being a kid in the 80s and going through my mom's cupboard and checking out all the labels and little miniature bottles of ointments and such.

I really enjoyed seeing this old spice tin, especially since it was marked with a Vancouver based company. I bet the stuff inside isn't food safe or anything, but it was funny to pick up these containers and note that they were nearly full.

Pretty sharp edges up top on the canister though! Maybe some food packaging items these days are better in the modern world, eh?

I always feel a little pang of disappointment these days when purchasing Vaseline and Mentholatum and the like, since they're always in plastic tubs with plastic lids. Too bad they don't have the metal lids and glass containers like they used to!

Vintage Le Creuset Roasting Pan with Steel Handles

I love finding old Le Creuset pieces out in the wild. I was at a flea market recently, and spotted a beautiful red pan sitting on the edge of a table full of junk.

I immediately recognized the pan as a small enameled cast iron roasting pan that I had lurked on eBay for in the past - it is the perfect size for fitting inside my small countertop oven that I use all the time.

The steel handles on the sides of the pan are characteristic of the older style Le Creuset roasting pan. The generation after this one ditched the handles, and rightfully so, I think! The steel handles seem easy to rust and hard to clean. I would also have a tough time finding them very useful with oven mitts on.

I walked up to the seller, acting very casual, and not even bringing the pan up with me. I asked him how much he wanted for the pan, and said, "Well, that one's made in France. It's a Le Creuset. My wife is French." I was expecting him to want a price higher than what I was willing to pay, when he closed with "I'd like five bucks for it." Music to my ears! Sometimes it pays to just act casual and not say a word.  =)

I hastily handed over my five bucks and collected my bounty. I ended up scrubbing this piece for a good twenty minutes with my trusty tools - lots of dish soap, a scrubber, and a wooden toothpick for the nooks and crannies.

The first thing I made in my pan was a nice, satisfying banana bread!

Vintage Billiards Balls

Hello Readers! Despite my long hiatus, I really am still thrifting. I made a great find this Spring at the Killarney Community Centre flea market. I love these unexpected events because you really have to sift through a bunch of junk to get to some treasure.

I had really low expectations going into this community thrift sale. There were lots of vendors with cheap trinkets like sunglasses and nail clippers for sale, but one interesting booth caught my eye.

There was a fellow selling some old wood and leather goods, and his booth had odd items like huge vintage belt buckles and old toy tins. I was admiring his stuff and having a chat with him. In the meantime, as any seasoned thrifter would do, I started rifling around the boxes he had under his table.

He had a dingy white plastic basket full of these old pool balls! I immediately saw a few that caught my eye - I love that minty green coloured one, and some of the number fonts were just great.

It is likely that some or all of these balls are bakelite... Did you know that in the old days, pool balls were made with ivory? Crazy stuff.

I remembered seeing a basket of old billiards balls at a hipster "curated" vintage shop recently, and nervously asked the flea market vendor how much he wanted for the balls. "Ten bucks for the whole lot, if you like it!" When you get a price like that, you don't haggle; you just get your ten bucks out and try to wipe the big grin off your face.

There ended up being 59 balls in the lot and they cleaned up really nice. I was really happy to pay less than 18¢ per pool ball as I was certainly thinking I'd end up paying more, for fewer balls!

Lemon Vinegar Cleaning Spray

So I have seen lots of blog posts and articles about homemade natural household cleaning sprays made of vinegar. First of all, I hate cleaning the house but I most certainly hate the chemical-y smell that lingers when I have to use spray Windex or Lysol.

I read somewhere that one of the common ways we ingest pollutants and harmful chemicals is from overspray onto food prep surfaces, onto food itself, or into the air that we breathe.

I've decided to see if the citrus infused vinegar mixture works as a safer alternate to commercial cleaning products. The concept is that the strong vinegar smell is a bit tough to take, so adding citrus peels helps tame that stench a little bit. The citrus oils then add their own nice smell, and provides some cleaning horsepower as well.

I scored some of these great Improved GEM Jars, made in Canada, at my local thrift. They have an aluminum collar with a glass lid! Embossed! For 25¢ each! I think this is the perfect vessel for a little citrus vinegar project.

I just peeled two lemons, a mandarin orange, and a large navel orange, then poured vinegar over them. The whole mixture is steeping in the fridge, where it will stay for a couple of weeks before I strain it. Then you simply pour into a spray bottle for window cleaning, and wiping down greasy or dirty surfaces. I hope it smells nice and cleans well - has anyone out there tried this before?

Sesame Street DIY Birthday Party and Loot Bags!

This past weekend we had a birthday party for my son, who just turned 2! If you are still reading, loyal blog followers, yep, it's been a whole two years since my free time for thrifting took a serious hit. I wanted a nice Sesame Street themed party for the event, but of course, done on a thrifty budget.

I was able to score some amazing deals at Dollar Tree, and found some great DIY ideas out there as well. One of my favourite things was creating these little loot bags with the faces of Cookie Monster and Elmo, his fave characters from Sesame Street. A little construction paper and cardstock, and 50 cent bags from the dollar store, voila!

Speaking of the dollar store, pardon this quick snapshot from inside our car on the way home, but I scored these awesome Elmo-face helium balloons at Dollar Tree - I had to call around to many of the stores locally as they sell out fast! I added some blue foil star balloons to get the Cookie Monster colours in there, but at $1.40 each after taxes, this was great bang-for-buck. They're still full and floating around the house, and we had extras for some of the little kids to take home.

I saw some Sesame Street blowers online that I thought were pretty cool but didn't have time to get them ordered (nor did I want to pay for shipping and all). I found some Pirate themed ones in a package with terrible graphics and cheap cardboard on them. I slipped those off and just added these simple printed tags instead.

It gave the kids something to look for with their name on it, and satisfied the germaphobe in me!

I love the way the bags look all lined up in rows. For the party, we put them up high so they could be seen but not grabbed by the excited kids.

Now I didn't get a chance to take a pic of the goodies inside the bag... Drat I forgot all about this! But the Dollar Tree has a lot of pretty fantastic colouring books, activity books, and flash cards that are all Sesame Street themed! I added some Goldfish crackers, notebooks, and that sort of thing to round out the bags.

I had a great time putting these all together, but I'm really itching to go hunting for cookwares at the thrift now that this task is completed!