Displaying Random Weird Stuff that you can’t throw away…

So, I’ve been sorting through some “stuff” and I’m determined that any item in our home will either be displayed or will be gotten rid of. No more storing of “stuff” in totes. Dang, Rubbermaid made a fortune off of me.

Anyway.

We’ve been schlepping around this collection of items that belonged to my husband’s great grandmother: The bottom to churning stick thing, a butter paddle, a candle snuffer and a thingy-ma-bob for darning socks. I am not a consultant for technical terms. Deal with it.

An advance apology – these are all cell phone pics. If I had to drag out the real camera, take staged photos, retouch and apply watermarks – this post would not get written. Also because these are all photos from my brand new iPhone that was about 1 hour old when I took these, and I’m not quite happy with the quality, but it is what it is. I’ll post better ones later. Maybe.

I was going to use a crate that I had purchased from some craft store awhile back, but it looked so new and needed some kind of treatment done to it, so I’d been putting this project off.

Then, last week, while cleaning out the garage, I was organizing Mr. Crazy’s bee-keeping equipment and I decided to steal this. I don’t know the official name of it, but it’s used in hive construction/assembly.

Looks like a crate to me!

First I had to brush the heck out of it because it was kind of grimy from being in the garage. That’s all I did to it. I’m in minimalistic expenditure phase when it comes to energy, time, resources and money right now.

Then, I took some copper wire that I had (you could use florist wire, but I couldn’t find mine) and wrapped it around each item and secured it in the back by twisting it with my pliers. Then I trimmed it and smashed it down a little to make it look better:

And here is the completed project :

I purposely mounted the items higher up on the bee crate thing because I intended on this being displayed above my kitchen cabinets and I knew the lower part would not be visible.

Here is the crate displayed in the same area as a spinning wheel and some kind of wool yarn winder that belonged to the same great grandmother:

And while waiting for it to be time to link – I was doing some more rearranging and found this sign that an artist friend (now deceased) had made for Mr. Crazy back when he was selling honey at a little fair. I think it’s perfect!

 

Mr. Crazy has informed me that this is a fruit crate. Even though it was the same exact size and shape of the other wooden items with the bee keeping equipment, it was not bee equipment and had nothing at all to do with bee keeping. I’m all for pretending he didn’t tell me that.

Thanks for looking.

Christine