Stop doomscrolling & come thrift with me in an empty thrift store 🦢 thrift flip DIY

It is every thrifter's dream to be let into the thrift store before it opens, so you can have it all to yourself. If that's not your dream, I don't believe you, and guess what? That dream's coming true today. Mm-hmm. It's cold. Get in here. Okay, so they didn't just let me in because I asked nicely. I'm actually filming a video for the American Cancer Society Discovery Shops today, which means I got to come in early and carouse around the store with no one to stop me. The specific video I'm filming for them is a short form video, so this video isn't sponsored that you're watching right now, which means I could do anything. I don't really have anything specific in mind that I'm looking for. Kind of vaguely something to thrift flip, maybe some sort of like vessel to paint on or like a picture frame to paint on, and then we gotta check the clothes. I mean, it would be foolish not to. This is at least five pounds of sequins. I'll just, I'll just be taking these. Ta-ba-ba-ba-babies. What if there's a Princess Diana one in here? I mean, what if? Anything could happen. I would die for you, seaweed. Do you think they'll get mad if I take that tie skirt off of that mannequin? Because I think I'm going to need that tie skirt off of that mannequin. Are you joking? It's like we're twins or something. I love you, Discovery Shop. Horses. One of my favorite sections to look through is the craft supplies. How sweet is this little artsy teddy bear cross stitch? Oh, those colors are good. Wooden beads. Look at the grain on those bad boys. There are so many cute little funky frames to be found. I think this is for a baby, but also what if maybe it's for me too? Somebody made all of these little greeting cards with shells on them. What a sweet project. Who is this? That's a gallery in Columbus. This is a wedding invite worked into an illustration. It's so cool. As sick of the snow as I am, that's undoubtedly pretty magical. The art here slaps hard every time. Look. Batik folk landscape. Yeah, those are sheep. Yeah, those are cows. Let me show you my favorite. How did they know I'm a clay head? Like, big time clay head. Ooh, that's good. Camel and rhythmic wooded landscape. Do you see the camel? I do. I don't see a price. It must be priceless. Oh, it's only 20 bucks. There's literally treasure everywhere you look. Like, check these out. These made in Italy little chrome handle mugs. These could be from the 70s. They're so gorgeously mid-century modern, and I might just need them. Four bucks a pop? I'll take it. Not me getting rickrolled while looking at an American tourister. Ooh, she's cute. Okay, gorgeous. Never actually opened one of these or seen what they look like inside. I think it's like a makeup toiletry case that you would take on a train or to travel in general. I guess I'm just train-pilled. Wow. Had to get on the floor for this one. Something about swirly plastic really gets me going. You can take this out. Sweet. I don't need it. I don't need another thing to put things in, but there's a face on the key. Maybe I do need it. Two percent. Oh my gosh, that's the cutest thing I've ever seen. Silk. Flowies. Almost certainly would not fit me, but so cute. If you don't tell me I don't need this kooky Australia sweater, who will? You are my last line of defense. I've never been much of a kooky girl myself, but I've also never seen a kooky sweater that I actually liked the color combo of, and this is incredible. Blaze orange. Potentially a little bit of yellow and black tartan. Maybe Gus wants it. If this isn't the cutest GD spring jacket. Polka dots. Obviously. Rushi ruffle at the bottom. See this lupinus. Oh, and it's reversible. Yeah. And the reverse is metallic pinstripes. Yep. It's like Anna Sui meets a little Issey Miyake vibe. If this was the only thing I got, I'd be happy. Maybe I should listen to that instinct, but I won't. I did also find this bright blue Pendleton blazer. The sleeves were too short. I did roll them up. It did solve the problem. Tell me I don't need it. Okay, I thought the silver raincoat was the best thing I found, but it is in fact a scarf miniskirt. And I mean tie miniskirt. I'm glitching. Was that not the most delightful way to spend the morning? I mean, come on. And I found some really good stuff. I'm always so surprised by how nice like the styling and curation is at Discovery Shops because they are donation based. And when people are donating stuff, you don't always get like the type of breadth or quality of items that you would want, but it feels like a curated like consignment store, even though it's not. Anyways, that koogie sweater was just on the wall waiting for me. When I checked out, I was like, did you guys put this out for me? And they were like, no, we just thought it was cool. And they were correct. Anywho, before I show you what I got, let me continue with our thrift flip. Did I mention we're doing a thrift flip? Can't quite remember. I gotta eat something. Me hungry. And I've been loving making a little flat ciabatta veggie sandwich recently. So good. So we're gonna bake a loaf real quick. And thankfully I've got this slow fermented olive oil ciabatta from the sponsor of this week's video, Wild Grain. Thank you Wild Grain for feeding me. If you're not familiar, Wild Grain is the first bake from frozen subscription box. They partner with small bakers and pasta makers across the country to keep the tradition of beautiful artisanal food alive. And y'all know I work from home. So having some croissants or a sourdough loaf, or maybe some cookies that I can just pop in the oven in the morning and then enjoy throughout the next couple of days is awesome. Wild Grain also uses a slow fermentation process. And if you have other dietary requirements or needs, Wild Grain's got a gluten-free box, vegan box, protein box, and as if we couldn't love them more, Wild Grain donates two meals to a food security non-profit of your choice for every box purchased. So if you want to try out Wild Grain for yourself, be sure to check out the link down below and use my code Kathleen to get $30 off your first box. Plus, you'll get free croissants for life. I baked some yesterday. They're delicious. Buttery flaky crust. Okay, thanks Wild Grain. Now, can I go eat my sandwich? Thank you. Okay, sandwich confused. Sandwich consumed. Let me show you what we're working with from Discovery Thrift. First and foremost, I have to confirm to you that I did get the Kooky sweater and I gave it to Gus and he looks very cute in it. Let me show you the clothing I got and then the things I went to do a petite thrift flip to. Okay, I of course got the slightly metallic polka dot pinstripe ruffle pleated spring jacket. These buttons, they're like slightly lenticular. Kind of feel like Lian Huang a little bit. You be you. Pack your personality. Never heard of it. Sounds fake. Sometimes that's the best stuff. I can't tell if it's supposed to have this kind of crinkly texture or if it's just super wrinkled. I think maybe it used to be way more pleated than this all over. Maybe someone washed it in a weird way because it's pretty uniform crinkling. Wow, if this still had all of its pleats intact. Incredible. Reversible. And then I could have sworn that I had this two-piece set like as a college student. Oh, can you tell I don't have a tripod today? I might just keep this on actually. And then this literal one-of-a-kind masterpiece. Yeah. Yeah. So, I looked up this brand because I'd never heard of it before. It just says it's not even a brand. It's just a name. Marsha Bloom. Apparently, Marsha had a boutique I think in Long Beach, California. Somewhere around there. Where she made and sold one-of-a-kind kind of bohemian free-spirited pieces. So, this is literally handmade. Designed and drafted by her. And these are real ties. I really like. Oh, where is it? My crossword one. Cherubim. Atonement. I don't know if I spelled atonement right. Holy cross. Unfortunately, from my Facebook research, it looks like Marsha passed away in 2020, which is very sad. And I'm so honored to have a piece of her treasure that she created. So, it has kind of that classic like 2008 pencil skirt with a peplum silhouette, which fine. I like it up here and then with like a big blazer or something on top and just letting these pop through. Almost like a little frilly hem for whatever you have on the top. I'm inspired to make something like this too. Maybe we should carry on the Marsha legacy. Which is why I also bought 12 ties for one dollar a piece. I really like the little color palette that I curated. Lots of stripes. Some polka dots. This one is my favorite. Oh, isn't that fun? What a combo. So, either like kind of a ribbony bodice top layer to go over something. Maybe some sort of like apron. I don't know. Maybe a bag. I'm still ideating on this. I feel like this is a bigger project than I have time to do right now. I really want to spend some time drafting something totally unique. So, when I spend time doing that, I have my supplies ready. Very excited for that. And that leads us to a couple home home good items, including the basket I was holding the scarves in. This little fruit basket. Very postmodern. I can imagine this in both like a 70s astro home or like an 80s postmodern chromed out penthouse. Very cool. I was really on like a silver and chrome and lucite kick. So, I found this vintage lucite easel for a photo or a piece of art. It's cool because you can smush something between the two layers and then you can also set something on the easel. So, maybe like we put some art here and then we layer some art on top of it. I don't know. It's a really cute little hinge. This is one of the pieces that I want to brick flip. Oh, it's a float frame with this silvery chromey frame. I was thinking we could press some stuff in between the layers, like flowers, collage pieces. Who knows? We got two more silvery frames. One is spirally and whimsical and cute. I think somebody added these blue pebbles after the fact, which I'm not mad at. Look at even the little back. The little stand is so curvilicious. Then we've got a little brutalist tiny frame with curves and hard edges and all that good stuff. This has a crazy patina on it. It's almost starting to look like coppery instead of silver, which is cool. And then the second item that I'd like to flip, vessel. I love this color. Dusty, somewhat darker cornflower blue. She's ceramic. She was $6. She's a perfect cylinder. Can you imagine some tulips popping out of the top of this? Anyways, I have a very specific idea about this. Not sure the medium we're going to use yet, whether it's paint or stickers of some sort, but I want to create almost like a pixel or needlepoint cross stitch pattern on here. And that's going to be a problem that we're going to have to solve with our big, beautiful brains. Okay. Those are my treasures. Thanks for coming to my treasure talk. It's time to take a break because it's date night. That means a cute outfit and sushi, and maybe some sparkling sake. So I have an idea for what I want to do. I'm just not totally sure how I want to achieve it. I think before we talk about the how anymore, we got to talk about the what. And as fun as it would be to paint a word picture for you, it's much better for a visual platform if I just show you. So let me make a sketch. Make all of my strategic decisions up front. And then when we get to paint, we just get to focus on painting and turn our brains. Here's my idea. It's a little wacky, but this is art. All right. So basically I want to paint or make two swans facing each other on the vase. Cute. It could just be that. It could just be that. And maybe it will be. I don't know, is the thing. That's nice. Okay. I've got my plan and I'm very excited. It's different than I thought it was going to be. And it's even better than I thought it was going to be. So I've pixelated my sketch because I want my finished result to be kind of like a mosaic pixely collage like this. And it kind of looked like that. I don't need to do all that this time. Anyways, the way that I'm going to achieve the pixelated look is I'm going to paint some paper in the colors that I need. I'm going to use my paper cutter to cut out a bunch of little squares, and then we're going to adhere those squares to our vase. So it's going to feel uniform and super square and kind of techie, but also that handmade craft folk art feel is going to be there with the hand-painted texture and the hand-placed squares. And it means we get to cut up some paper and collage a little bit. We can't really escape collage in my videos these days, can we? Fun! Let's mix up some paint. It's just you and me and the sounds of nature. My first time sitting out here since the fall and it does smell like something is deceased in the general vicinity. Quick skeleton scan. I mean, I don't see anything. I've got all the base colors I need to make a swan. Orange for the actual bodies of the swan. Got a lot of white, some pink that we're going to layer white on top of to have a warm white. I really want to use a pretty dry technique, so like dry brushing the color across, because if we soak it, it's going to get a little wrinkly and ripply, and that's going to be harder to stick onto our beautiful curved surface. If you're wondering what I'm listening to, I'm still working on the last book in the Stormlight Archives. What is it, Wind and Truth? And I also have Kill Your Gaze by Chuck Tingle. I sat down the other day with Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle. In the morning, it was done by early evening. I flew through it. I really enjoyed it. If you like a campy horror story about a conversion camp, no pun intended, I liked it. Nice thing about using the dry brushing technique is that it also dries real fast, but I am using the dry time as an excuse to go to the craft store because we do need some sort adhesive for our little paper pieces. Come along. Let's get some glue. Also, remember how it was snowing when we were thrifting earlier in the video? What's that all about? Ain't nobody doing it like Ohio. The most edible aisle at the craft store. There are over 40 different versions of Mod Podge here. What if I picked the wrong one? When in doubt, buy three different kinds. So, this is what I learned from my brief online research. Super Gloss has the type of finish I want because it's very smooth. It has a self-leveling agent. Cool. But this is really more meant to be like a finisher, like you put it on afterwards. I'm gonna see if I can also use it as a beginner as well. And then, it doesn't work. I just got Classic Gloss. And then, this has nothing to do with this project, but I did get some Fabric Mod Podge. I saw, um, Michelle from Tropico Photo has been doing some really cool Mod Podge collaging with fabric on clothing recently, so I thought I would like to do that as well, eventually. Anyways, time to get going. Here, I'll put you in your little seat, your car seat, your tiny little, little baby car seat, because you're so tiny. Come on. I won't eat you. Not this time. A little bit of math thing. I figured out that each of my squares needs to be one centimeter square, which is, I love that. I love a round number. Ooh, ready to Mod Podge. Lots of little vessels with lots of little pieces of paper. Is that of interest to you? I feel like my whole life has been building up to this moment of actually sitting down and doing the craft that I've been thinking about. For days, cleaned my vase. Sorry. Applied a grid over my sketch. Can you see? So, I can just go line by line and apply paper. Now, I'm going to go the extra mile and make sure that I have a perfectly vertical line, because once I get started, if things start skewing off to the side, all the art will skew off to the side. So, I'm going to test a little contraption. Okay, here's my thought. I've got a piece of embroidery floss taped to the inside rim. I've got a little clip on the other side of the embroidery floss. Embroidery floss. We're going to let gravity do its thing and get us a perfectly vertical line. It's that easy, huh? So, that way, once I start, I'll have something to guide me and I can keep moving this string around if I need to check my work. This is all assuming that the Mod Podge will work as an adhesive. My goal is to finish this before the sun goes down so I can go. Oh my gosh. Update. It's happening. I love how the color modulation is turning out. So good. That looks scary, but it's just how I'm keeping track of what I've done so far. This super gloss stuff is actually working so much better than I expected. Let me show you a little demo in case you want to do this yourself. So simple. Okay, so I have a brush about the size of the item, which is nice because I don't have to do a whole lot of brush stroking. I can just do a quick little, apply a little square of glue, stick a dry piece on, and then nudge it into place, and then use a little more gloss on top. Really shellac it down, kind of slowly pushing the edges so that it's all pushed flat against the vessel. No edges are sticking up. And like I said at the beginning, the nice thing about this specific super gloss is that it's self-leveling so that even if you're a little bit messy, as it dries, it kind of smooths out. Like I thought I was gonna have to go over everything again with a top coat because without it, things would look really bumpy and streaky, but with this stuff, that's not really the case so far. Like I don't think I'm gonna have to do that. That's it. The worst part about this is picking up the little individual pieces of paper and having them stick to your Mod Podgey fingers. That's it. I have not been using my little embroidery floss guide for a couple rows, and I'm starting to reap the benefits of that, aka my rows are getting a little angled. Status check. We have one swan completed. Look at that little butt. It's pretty cute. And guess what? We got the head of another one. My eyes are starting to go cross-eyed. The fumes are fuming, so I'm gonna take a break, grab a little bike ride, and then we'll finish up this evening. Oh my gosh, it's so cool. You like it too? Y'all as flabby-gasty as I am by how cute this turned out, like now that's an object. I can see a very clear future for myself, a path if you will, of me just making these for the rest of my life, because wow, what a meditative process. From letting a thrifted object find me in the thrift store, seeing the potential, the blank canvas of it all, coming up with an idea, thinking about how can we put that idea down, flip it and reverse it, maybe make it a pixelated slash cross stitch slash mosaic moment, and then just execute the crap out of it. Let's go find a cute spot for this. Okay, be honest, is it crazy to put it on top of a toilet? Yeah, I think so. Do we keep it simple with just the coasters and the vase, or do we add a little candle? That's good. It's good actually. You know, this isn't the best time of day for this room in the morning, that's when the light's really flooding in, so I can't wait to see how it looks tomorrow. Wow, that's cute. Oh, you want to know more about my candlestick holder? Yeah, she's beautiful. Yeah, she's got a snuffer on a chain. Imagine creeping through the halls, pursuing a ghost in a haunted painting or something with this bad boy. Wait, let's complete the illusion. I found this house match container, which is from State the Label, in the bags, like plastic bags at Volunteers of America. Like, who would donate this? They're bougie matches. Come on. I can't take credit for sourcing this myself. I follow this really awesome account called Virga. They just have the most beautiful objects. What is it with me and objects? But they're all art pieces, and they're so gorgeous, and they had one of these for sale, and I was like, oh, yep, that's everything I've ever wanted, and it promptly sold. So, did a little eBay sleuthing and found one for myself, and it was located, like, 20 minutes from me, which is funny. All the good, slightly haunted stuff is in Ohio. We know this. What an adventure. We started on a snowy day in a yet-to-be-opened thrift store and ended exactly where we were meant to. If you do something like this, please let me know. Please send me pictures. I'd love to hype you up. If you have any questions, happy to answer them. I've only done it once, but it turned out pretty good that it was very simple, so let me know down in the comments. I think I'm gonna make, like, a short video, probably explaining the process in case anyone's curious, and thanks to the Discovery Shop for letting me come in early. Again, this video is not sponsored by them, but I do love them like this. Next week, I believe we're going to be doing a bit of a reset, kind of a monthly reset for our creative practices, for our minds. It's about time for the April wallpaper collage pack, so that will be then. We're going to be dyeing some clothing soon. Not in next week's video, but soon. I want to potentially paint on these chairs that I got for free in a recent video sometime soon, so if you like craft and you like secondhand goods and you haven't subscribed yet, I think it would be a good idea, because you're probably gonna like it here. I hope you're taking care of yourself and your neighbors as best as possible, and I will see you next time. Come follow me on Instagram if you want to hang out in between, because that's where we get crazy during the week in between uploads. Okay, for real though, I love you. Bye!