So glad you came out of lurkdom Fixintojunk. It's such a nice forum, I hope you'll join us regularly now with posts and pics. An idea for your Valentine's Day cards, send them to me!!! I am so jealous. $2.00 for a whole suitcase, what a fantastic buy. At a local antique store here, she is selling five vintage Valentine's Day cards postmarked 1917. They were made in France and are signed Charlie, to Olive. He must have been stationed in France during WWI. Besides being cardstock, they have been machine embroidered and have lace on them. They are so pretty. She wants $20 a piece for them and although I'd like all five of them, I set one aside and told her maybe I'd come in and get the rest over time if no one else got them. I was going to place them in a long skinny frame using a black matte around each of them, five in a row. Another idea you can do is to hang them from a Valentine's Day feather tree. You can see what the feather tree looks line at "primitivesbykathy.com" online. She's pricey, so you can just type "Valentine's Day feather trees" in your web browser line and see what web sites you can look at for price comparison. They are really cute, coming in pink or red. Off topic, they are coming out with feather trees for Easter in chick yellow, pink and light green. I think they are so pretty. You can punch a small hole in the corner of your postcards and string them with skinny red/white/pink ribbon and hang them on the feather tree, along with some red hearts you can find at Michael's on sale right now. They are glittered or make your own using cardstock. Cut your a heart shape, paint it red/pink/white and sprinkle them with "Diamond Dust" or just clear glitter or red glitter using spray adhesive first. Punch a little hole in them and again, hang with ribbon as the postcards. You could also just display them around your room using a long piece of wire which at one end is curled around and slip the card into the curled end to hold it. Check out "junkmarketstyle.com" for this idea. Whatever you do, please post pics of the cards. I'd love to see them. Sal

You can register with BM and they will send you as many sample sheets as you want. Don't even charge for shipping. Cannot tell you how much $$ this has saved me in sample sizes. I get multiples of the same color and tape them together to get a large area to move around the room. Sometimes I will end up buying a couple samples sizes of the actual paint if I'm undecided between 2 colors after doing this, but much better than the many, many sample sizes I would have to buy before. Here is a link that might be useful: Color samples - will need to register

Gray rarely exists in architectural paint color collections. Very few paint colors are achromatic gray. Big old long story how and why that it is. Suffice it to say what many people label as "gray" are colors knocked back so far they're closer to neutral gray than the root or parent colorant. The root colorant that's been broken to neutralize it or move it closer to a true neutral gray. Colors are colors and it's best to approach the whole color, not just one attribute like undertone. Have to deal with the whole color all at once: masstone, undertone (if there is one), chroma (or colorfulness), and value (how light or dark). Here's how you might want to go about doing that. Each brand orders their colors differently. One thing they all have in common is organization by hue family. You're going to want to look in the area (maybe areas) between green and violet. That will put you in the true blues and blue greens. Stay a couple steps or sections away from greens. Also stay a couple steps or sections away from violet. It's in the area in between green and violet hue families that you'll find silvery blue chips. Take several and look at them in a natural light source. Don't use the light simulator thingies in the store. Once you have swatches that you feel are "silvery blue", you can use those chips to look for more, similar colors in the sections that might be labeled as neutral, muted, or complex neutrals.

How many tons of flower seeds do you want? Just joking. I use my old cards to make book marks especially the shiny ones.Cut them and usually fold them in half so I have a front and back to the bookmark. I'd love to have some of your cards. Send me an E-mail and I will check my seed stock. By old, how old do you mean?