Teeny paintings and old photographs from Ken's

I'd been eyeing some tiny frames at the pound shop for a while now. Yesterday I say they were on sale, buy one get two free! Bargain! So I picked up a load of them. I'm going to make some little paintings to go in them and put them up in the shop. Michael had the great idea of doing them in sets of three, so I think I'm going to do that with most of them. I'm just sketching loads now, to decide what to put in them. One will probably be a set of robots, another will be ghosty things, and another will be hairy monsters.

I still want to nab some sweaters at charity shops and recycle them into weird little plushies. And since Valentine's is the next big holiday after Christmas, I think after I finish with these mini paintings I'll work on sets of handmade valentines.

I finally made it into a shop called Ken's today, which specializes in vintage magazines, newspapers, printed ephemera and the like. Ever since I saw it, it reminded me of a shop I used to love in San Diego called Paper Antiques. I could have blown so much money at Paper Antiques, mainly on the massive selection of abandoned family photos. One that I've bought, which I like to call Scary Baby*, is proudly hung on our wall. The rest are still packed away for the time being.

Ken's though, seems to have less of a selection of the photos I look for. I did find a box of photos that were doubled up on cards; I forget what they were called, but it's two nearly identical photos side by side. There weren't many with people in them, but I ended up buying two in the end. One of a bustling Victorian street scene that looked a bit dark and creepy because of the lighting, and another of a man standing next to a fountain looking suspiciously like he'd just pissed in it or was thinking about it. That's probably not what really happened, but that's what sprang to mind. It made me laugh.

I will be going back to Ken's for sure. There's a lot there I could use for various projects, and it's a lot of fun just to look around! It's a treasure trove.


*Scary Baby is so called because it is a rather old photograph on card, and it's got the black and white equivalent of red eye... which makes it appear as if the baby has evil, possessed looking eyes. I don't know what draws me to things like that, other than the fact that my brain seems to come up with interesting stories about them.