A Frugal Li'l Road Trip Basket

Goodman and I often take short day-trips around the area and like to take a few things with us ... like real coffee cups, a thermos of good strong coffee and maybe a snack or two so I needed something other than a grocery bag to hold the cups and snacks.

Lily-of-the-Valley

Y'all know I like practicing frugality whenever possible.  And now, more than ever, it pays as so often when buying something new the quality you expect just isn't there.  I found just what I needed at a tag sale last year. The price on this li'l basket with a padded liner was just a few dollars so I snapped it up and took it home.

The elastic closures were shot, but it was in good shape, otherwise. It really just needed a good cleaning and some sprucing up.  Love the padded liner complete with hot/cold pack.

So I scrubbed the basket clean and washed the liner then got busy making a few flowers and leaves with polymer clay...

Source

 I used these tiny cookie cutters to make the flower shapes. 

Baked them in the oven and let them cool...

 Then used a glue gun to apply them to the lid of the basket.

 And those little elastic ties were replaced with new ones that I perked up with more flowers and leaves.  I'm very happy with it.

 Goodman gives me a strange li'l grin when he sees it in the backseat of the car, but I don't mind. ;)

Hope you're enjoying lots of spring blossoms.

Bearded Iris

And birds, too.

Fastidiously clean Mockingbird

Shared at The Art of Homemaking Mondays, Roses of Inspiration Linkup

New Hobby, Maybe...

 Hi there! Uh huh, my bloggin' is sporadic at best, but anyways we've been offline again and will be for awhile. Meantime....I've kinda taken up quilting - in the most rudimentary manner, of course. I'm using what scraps I have on hand for the most part and winging my way to a small, baby-sized quilt.

 Not perfect, but it's workin'.

 All the squares are 2in. which is way to small to start with, but I usually do things the hard way. Sigh. More on this later.

 This is the wildlife viewing point at the Hiwassee Refuge.

 After hearing about the Sandhill Cranes over at Chipmunknits Goodman and I decided to take a roadtrip and get a look at them ourselves. (My camera wouldn't take a great pic so I'm in the market for a new one.)

 The black bird in the pic is an Asian Crane. Nobody knows how it got to the refuge, but lots of folks are flocking to see it.

 After viewing the birds we followed signs to a memorial to the Cherokee Removal.

 Oh, what a sad, sad memorial. It's really hard to understand how that happened.

Hopefully it's a reminder, like the ones we see about the Holocaust, to never forget so we don't make the same mistakes again.
Hope your having a great New Year!