Cheap and cheerful vintage Golden Books wall art. Lovely!

So, the other day I found, in a free pile, an old Golden Book, you know, the little kids books with the golden spines. The book was decimated, and the cover was half hanging off. But I couldn't let this sweet piece of cover art end up in the trash.So I dragged it home. ( I am so scared I am going to end up on Hoarders: Buried Alive)
Anyhoo it sat around for a few days til I was messing around with stuff on my son's walls and it occurred to me that it would look great in a frame. And it does.
You can frame the entire book, just pop the whole thing behind  glass. Then you wouldn't be destroying literature, which seems inherently wrong to me.
Golden Books are kicking around in nearly every thrift store I've ever been in. And they're bound to be less than a really nominal amount of change. Some of the older covers have wicked cool art on them. But as they are from a different era there can be some challenging stuff that is totally whcked out politically incorrect. Framing the covers is a great way to bring vintage kids art into your kids bedroom without  incorporating those pesky outdated gender and race stereotypes into their fragile little psyches.
Here's one of my favorite covers, see how awesome they are?

Golden Books are a really neat kind of phenomenon, they are somewhat universally familiar, and can evoke kid feelings in lots of us. They are attached to buried memories and feelings. And if you want to see something truly amazing here's a link to an artist Ryan Novelline who created a fairytale dress entirely out of discarded Golden Books. Magnifique!

Every journey...

I did know what I was getting myself into, I just refused to be overwhelmed by it. If I were to think "Can I build a fort, plan it, work hard building it, paint it, sand it?" the thought would be suffocatingly exhausting.
But if I think, "I want my kids to have a fort, can I haul this wood over here? Can I screw this board to the floor, can I screw this other board to that one?" Each of these little acts are doable. And some of them are enjoyable. Like today I drove out to the landfill where there is a free paint exchange, my little toddler guy sleeping in the back. Chet Baker was on the radio. it was beautiful and sunny. It was a beautiful drive  for about half an hour, and at the end I got to root through can cans, and was excited to find beautiful colors of paint for free. It was all in all a great little chunk of time.
It's also part of my decision to make this fort out of free stuff. I haven't bought anything, except for some screws and a handsaw.

"You don't know what you're getting yourself into..."

I have two boys. They are my kids, and I am a single Mom. And I love tree forts. and I wish they had a tree fort. But we don't have a tree in the little garden attached to our rental townhouse. But that's no reason not to have an awesome fort.
So I am building them one. Out of salvaged wood. There is a wonderful 'Free Store' in the city where we live. I drive about 20 minutes through beautiful farm country and there are all manner of things, set out for free. Lots of furniture. Lots of bed frames and assorted things people no longer want. I love the free store. Because I love refinishing furniture, and painting things.
So I began by measuring a square on the ground in my garden. A square that looked big enough for a small fort. Then I called my Dad, and asked, about the foundation. Because if it's on the ground the wood will rot, but I am not about to go laying a concrete foundation in the garden of my rented townhouse, for a fort.

So we decided the best thing to do was dig a few inches down and cover the ground with concrete cinder blocks, and then lay the floor on that. Which worked perfectly.
When I told my Dad I was going to build a fort for my kids he said and I quote "You can't do that, you don't know what you're getting yourself into." And he's right, It's a huge job, it's been hard work, sawing and screwing in and measuring and figuring things out, and getting them wrong and taking them apart again. 
But it has also been awesome. My arms are getting really strong, from carrying around a toddler and from using the screwdriver and hauling huge chunks of wood around.
To make things more challenging I decided I was only going to use hand tools. It is much safer with a toddler bambling around the yard to be using a little hand held screwdriver rather than a giant noisy drill. And there's no silly cords lying around, and a hand held saw you can just stop sawing if you want to avoid sawing something by just stopping moving your arm, but an electric saw keeps going a while. 
So now, it has been two weeks, and I have almost three walls up, and it's really cool looking.