My Vintage Soul

Barbara's Sale

I have a love/hate relationships with sales. I love what I'm lucky enough to find, but I hate what I have to go through to find it.

First, I spend a lot of time trying to sleuth out what seems like a good sale (i.e. reasonably priced vintage and no baby crap). Then, if it’s an estate sale, I plan to arrive a few hours early to sign the list for a low number, which means I then have to camp out in my car. And finally, once I'm inside the door, there’s the frenzy of trying to find what I want before someone else does.

But there was none of that at Barbara’s Friends and Family Sale. It was unlike any sale I’ve ever been to before or probably will ever go to again.

In fact, I was lucky enough to be the first friend there and I shopped leisurely. Later, Barbara and I sat on her front porch, relaxing over a cup of coffee and zucchini bread, while Carson, Barbara’s dog, eager to join us, gazed longingly out the front window.

But I’m sure you want to know what I bought, don’t you? Or, maybe not, considering that I’d be sad, too, if I lived across the country and couldn’t get to her house in just 20 minutes.

So, I’ll try to make this quick and relatively painless. Really, I am not gloating. Feel free to look away if it becomes too much to bear.

There was lots of vintage Christmas of course, which was neatly stacked on a table next to the porch.I could have bought it all, but I was trying to be sensible, knowing I have a lot of this at home.

My purchases:

Three boxes of small indents;

a big box of mercury glass picks;

some beautiful figural ornaments;

a trio of knee-hugging elves (which if I recall correctly aren't Barbara's favorite decorations);

and several ceramic angel heads. Everything is perfect for a project I'm working on that I’ll be telling you more about in a few weeks.

A pair of vintage horse show ribbons.

Several vintage children’s hangers.

Here's a closeup of the cow-jumping-over-the-moon detail.

And the cutest apron that I’ve ever seen. It's made from children's hankies. 

And that was it. I restrained myself from her lovely kitchen items, linens and assorted frames, knowing that I already have more than I can ever use or list on Etsy. And, honestly, I probably need to have one of these sales myself.

So Barbara, thank you again. It was a lovely time, and when we do meet at the next sale, I’ll be the one with the coffee and zucchini bread (and/or pumpkin doughnuts).

Serendipity in Bouckille

I saw the usual sights in Madison-Bouckville:

Charming vintage clothing and hats that could have been straight from the set of "Mad Men;"

photos of long-ago graduating classes, fraternal organizations and sporting teams; 

kitschy seating in pink;

and kitchenware in aqua;

and tons of "American Picker"-style signs. 

But I was obsessed with this -- the House of Vintage Christmas -- which I discovered on Gina's Facebook page on Monday.

But now it was Saturday, and I was convinced that there couldn't possibly be one bit of this left for me.

Well, I was wrong, because it looked like there was hardly a dent in that huge pile. There were still plenty of ornaments, bottlebrush trees, mercury beads, angels, etc. 

Why? Maybe it was the lack of customer service. The guy running the booth hardly looked up from his conversation with a few other dealers. (I think they were discussing something about prices for WWII collectibles.) When I finally did get his attention, I learned that his prices were sky-high, especially if you intend to re-sell. Ornaments were $5 each and a full box of small mismatched ones, with maybe five or six good decorative ones, were at least $20 to $25.

So I thought I was destined to leave Bouckville without any holiday cheer. But then I saw a box next to a fence not far from the House of Vintage Christmas.

Inside, there was a lot of vintage Christmas. Some of it was junk and some of it was water-damaged, but some was worth saving.

The ornaments that were left after I junked the junkers.

And the other odds and ends.

The price for all of if: 5 bucks, about the same that the Vintage Xmas guy wanted for one ornament.

But wait, it gets better. I arrived home to find Barbara's post on her Friends and Family Sale, and since she lives 20 minutes from me, guess where I was bright and early on Sunday morning?

I know that you wish you were just as close, so the details are coming up in my next post.

 

The Road to Baraboo

When you come across a really good treasure in the trash, you have to wonder about who owned it when it was brand-spanking new. Or at least I do.

Consider then, if you will, one cute gray vintage suitcase (on the left) and one white plastic sewing box with a faux wood grain finish (on the right). I found them side by side at the curb earlier this week, and of course, I had to bring them home.

The suitcase had me as soon as I saw it, with its tweedy gray exterior and a moniker that recalls a time when taking a trip wasn’t an exercise in endurance, when you didn’t have to worry about being groped in an airport, when traveling was, well, a joy.

And the sewing box? I hesitated a little. It seemed a tad tacky at first, but then I opened it and saw that it still had the original notions tray inside. More intriguing was what was written on the bottom (and is really tough to photograph so there is no photo): The name of the manufacturer, Max Klein Inc., and the site where it was made, Baraboo.

Baraboo? Sounds exotic, doesn’t it? Certainly a place where a young lady would take her Travel Joy suitcase to, right?

Turns out that Baraboo is Baraboo, Wisc., a city of 12,000 in the center of the state. Never having been there myself, or to the state of Wisconsin for that matter, I can’t speak to how exotic it was or still might be. What I did learn is that Baraboo is home to the former headquarters of the Ringling Brothers circus, now the Circus World Museum. So maybe our young lady, with her Travel Joy in tow, was running away to join the circus.

In Baraboo, she found out that the circus life wasn’t for her, so she took a job at Max Klein Inc., making plastic sewing boxes and other housewares. The company was in business from 1956 until 1972, when it was bought out by another manufacturer.

Years later, she moved to the west side of Syracuse, N.Y., and eventually, her Travel Joy suitcase and her Max Klein sewing box ended up on the side of the road, ready for the next eager traveler.

Or maybe not.

But that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Thousand Island Park

Would you like to visit a place where vintage is celebrated on every street?

Would you go there even if you had to cross a big bridge that’s almost in another country? (And no, I did not take this photo while driving.) 

Well I did, and now I’m wondering why, after living in New York state for more than 25 years, that it took me so long to discover Thousand Island Park.

Thousand Island Park is a resort community on the southwestern side of Wellesley Island, which is one of the largest of the Thousand Islands that are in the St. Lawrence River.

Founded in 1875 as a religious retreat, TIP, as the locals call it, is home to more than 300 Victorian-era homes, many of them painted in eyepopping hues and
trimmed in gingerbread.

My favorite, I think, is this one.

Or maybe this one.

But it’s really hard to choose because they all have their unique charm.

I was in TIP earlier this week because I’m writing a story about the community. It's little excursions like this one that remind me of why it’s sometimes still cool to be a journalist.

And I’m sure I will be back to TIP again. And I know that it won’t take me 25
years to return.

Catching Up on Christmas and More

For the last few weeks, I've been lamenting, OK, whining, about the lack of good vintage Christmas this year. Particularly the lack of ornaments.

Well, this weekend, I started to make up for it. A little. I have still have a long way to go, however, to match the lucky streaks of Laurie and Barbara.

I discovered a garage sale on Friday that advertised 57 years of stuff. And that was where I found these ornaments. Actually, they weren't all outside. The lady running the sale thought that she might have a few more ornaments inside and came out with several boxes. I bought them all ...

as well as something that I don't see that often: reflectors in their original packages.

There were also miniature bulbs and a set of very cute German-made angels.

I've seen this type of tree topper several times, but never intact and never in the original box. And, yes, it does work.

 

I also found several of these plastic ornaments. I was really thrilled to find some in their original boxes until I noticed (after I bought them of course) that whatever might have been inside of them at one time wasn't there now. Or maybe there wasn't anything there to begin with?

And what else? In the non-holiday purchases, there was this funky metal waste paper can, a paint-by-number collie painting and two nearly matching yellow rose hat boxes that came from two different sales.

And finally, yo-yos. Actually, a rainbow of yo-yos.

This is just a fraction of them, and as soon as I figure out just how many there are and how I'm going to divide them up, they'll be in my Etsy shop.

The big winner was my daughter Grace, who came upon a motherlode of vintage clothing at rock-bottom prices. Unlike the day of the Dumpster Dresses, she left with a huge smile on her face and a big pile of "Mad Men"-era fashion. Yes, I know, a fashion show is in order.

A Better Backdrop

For some time now, you've been looking at my kitchen table and probably didn't know it.

But I did, and it bothered me. For the lack of something better, it had become my go-to spot for photos. But it was dark and reflected light and the background behind it was always cluttered. I knew that there had to be a better way to present items on my blog and for Etsy. So, I came up with a better backdrop.

Here's what you need:

Display board (the kind you use for a science fair project)

Wallpaper
Basic supplies, including ruler, pencil, glue and scissors

Here's a closeup of the wallpaper. I picked it because I liked the pattern - a raised fleur-de-lis design -- and I already had it on hand. I found it at Lowe's a few years ago.

Putting the backdrop together couldn't be simpler.

Measure the three panels of the display board -- the middle and the two sides -- and cut the wallpaper to fit. This is where the ruler, pencil and scissors come in handy.

Then glue the paper to the board. Be sure to smooth that bead of glue so that the wallpaper lays flat.

And, there you have it. Put another piece of wallpaper on the top of the table to serve as the "bottom" of your backdrop, and you'll be taking photos like this:

instead of like this:

Total cost of the project was less than $3 (because I already had the wallpaper). It took about a half-hour to make. Not bad for a backdrop that's clean, simple and very portable. Good luck with yours.