#shadowboxes

The second-pictured shadowbox and the blocked one look almost identical, and both have been in my family for literally as long as I can remember. All of the others were thrifted, one way or another.

The first pic is the biggest outlier of things that weren’t thrifted: the Li’l Me Valerie doll (barely visible, on the far left,) the Grand Champions mini horses, everything MLP, the Hello Kitty Squinkies, most of the Shopkins jars, and the polymer clay cat (which I made.) The trucks have all been found at the Goodwill outlet. My dad had a long career as a semi driver, my mom was his that-was-her-job-too driving partner for a while, one of my old jobs was sorting paperwork & receipts for trucker reimbursement and I still have all the truck trading cards they’d send in for the sorters, and it’s just something I never lose a satellite interest in. If I find another shadowbox or rack for the jars, that one will probably be taken over by more trucks, eventually. I’m at least trying to keep it to vintage metal ones, or models with something that moves or opens. That helps trim numbers more than you’d think. I like the late 70s/early 80s semis best, anyhow.

The second pic is an ode to me being a sucker. I’m not expressly a fan of Garfield, Snoopy, Smurfs, nor Frozen, but I absolutely am a fan of 80s stuff, 80s Happy Meal toys, and ice & crystal castles. Everything visible here, except for the shadowbox, itself, was thrifted. Even the Barbie legs, sticking out of the box to the right. My family used to have a 90% complete collection of those gumball machine football helmets, but god only knows what happened to them all, between moves. All that remains is the Bengals helmet, from before it was redesigned to the stripes, and if we were going to keep one specifically, that would be the one. And now this Broncos one, that came out of a grab bag. I really have no interest in Denver, but 9-year-old me liked the Broncos because horse, so it’s weirdly the helmet 80s-me would’ve wanted the most to find.

The log cabin is effing adorable, and looked so much better just after letting it soak in a wipe-down of furniture oil. I think it’s meant as a display for some line of gift shop figurines, but I can’t remember what the back labels says and I’m not taking it down to find out. I’ve had the Avon flower girl since like ‘83, I made the clam, and I think the green bird came from Target, years ago. The puffball things are souvenirs of the USAF’s 40th anniversary in 1987, which is appropriate since the Air Force museum lives in the same town that I do. The best bits are the connected line of bunnies, which my friend @evil-robot-cat sent me for Christmas, and the don’t-ask-me-how matching line of chickens that I found a couple months later at the outlet. Not something I ever expected to have a sort-of pair of, but it makes me happy that I do.

The green shadowbox used to be pink, and is probably as old as my white ones. I’ve never seen another hexagon yet. It’s hard to describe how tiny some of this stuff is, but the green thing in the lower left is a 30′ tape measure, and the yellow hotrod car is a Micro Machine. E.T. is not a full two inches tall. The Miss Piggy used to be a keychain fob, and was a prize from the now-gone Americana amusement park in southwest Ohio. She’s always has red hair. I’m not sure why. The white box to her left is supposed to be for kids to take home a tooth lost at the dentist’s (no tooth included, luckily.) Tiny, tiny shit.