Walking in a Vintage Wonderland

My posting on this is a little late (mea culpa), but there's still time to get in on the Etsy Vintage Street Team's $10 gift certificate give-aways. Every day in December (extended until the 31st), a different and wonderful Etsy vintage shop will give away a $10 gift certificate. All you have to do is to post a comment on the EVST blog with a link to your favorite item in that shop (complete details are available here). Today's featured shop is abbysrelics, who carries some of the most fabulous vintage postcards around (a weakness of mine).

If you're just finding out about this, sorry to say you've missed some great shops, but there are more than 20 to go (including my shop), and you can sign up every day. More important, great vintage shopping is available every day on Etsy. Put "etsyvintageteam" in the search bar for some of the best.

Mr. John: Milliner to the Stars

There aren’t very many biopics I’d like to see made, but I just found a character who’d be perfect for one: larger than life, incredibly talented and successful, flamboyant, and yet with a touch of humor, even irony, about himself.

I’m talking (if you haven’t guessed) about Mr. John, one of the glitterati among mid-century U.S. milliners. His accomplishments, in a career spanning almost 60 years, were legendary, yet today he is largely forgotten

Mr. John--John Piocelle, or John P. John as he dubbed himself--led a sophisticated, glamorous life in Hollywood and produced some of today's most sought after vintage hats. He was also noted for work, before their split in 1948, as half of the John-Frederics duo, whose most famous hat was the straw and green velvet bonnet worn by Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. Often using pseudonyms, Mr. John designed Garbo’s hat in Mata Hari, Dietrich’s cloche in Shanghai Express, and Monroe’s headdress in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Outside of films, Mr. John designed hats for everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to Gypsy Rose Lee, from Jaqueline Onassis to Wallace Simpson. Even my mother owned a Mr. John hat, one with a bobbing flower similar to the one in my Etsy shop (pictured above), which she assures me was considered quite fashionable. His hats often showed his sense of humor—a bannana hat with a zipper, a hat for an elephant at the Republican National Convention, an Eiffel tower hat, an airplane hat.

This sounds like enough for a great movie, but his personal life was equally flamboyant. His Central Park West apartment had a white and gold décor he described as “Louis Unrecognisable” and had free-roaming macaws, cockatoos, and parrots. Once he visited a friend wearing a floor-length gold cape and with a bird on his shoulder.

Despite all this flash and glamour, Mr. John was known primarily for his flattering, wearable hats. Even with the bobbing flower, my mother said she always felt great in her Mr. John.

Now for casting that biopic: I'm thinking maybe Robert Downey Jr?

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Much of this information came from a fascinating article by Drake Stutesman.

Catching Up

It has been so long since I blogged, a friend asked my husband if I was sick. A few other friends (who I didn't realize were regular readers) told me they missed me! Aw, so sweet. But blogging is like going to the gym--once you stop, it is so hard to get going again.

And I need to do that too--but one hurdle at a time.

My life has been pretty crazy lately (whose isn't?). But so as not to blow all my blog posts in one sitting, I'll just mention one project I've been working on: getting some jewelry together for Steam Powered, the California steampunk convention going on now in Sunnyvale. I'm not there, but my jewelry is! Some wonderful people from the Etsy Steam Team (a group of Etsy steampunk artists who work together) have several vendor tables where they're showing jewelry from team members who couldn't make it there themselves. This is my first art show, and I'm not even there! But I've seen a few pictures and know that they look better in costume than I would!

It was fun to get together a group of pieces of one theme, and while I was doing this I listed very little in the way of new steampunk pieces in my Etsy store. But who knows? Some of them may return to me and be available soon.

Eureka Eureka--world beads and a bit of history

I don't make beaded jewelry, but after spending some time with Debby Arem and her Etsy shop, Eureka Eureka, I'm sorely tempted to begin. Debby's shop has several things I love: rocks, gems, and stories of far-off lands. With her husband, Joel Arem (who worked for the Smithsonian and authored seven books on gems and minerals), Debby traveled all over the world in search of the finest and most unusual beads.

The ones I'm showing here are her favorites: glass beads from West Germany. Some of these are from the 1950s, and as anyone who sells or loves vintage knows, they don't make 'em like they used to.

The rest of Debby's shop is equally fascinating, with beads from Pakistan, China, Japan, Italy, Czechoslovakia--you name it. To read more about her beads and her career as a jewelry designer, check out this interview on the Etsy Vintage Street Team blog.

Last Sale Day--Whew!

My week has been too busy--listing lots of new vintage items in my Etsy shop in honor of the vintage sale that's been going on all week. OK, today is the last day of the sale, and I've sold almost ten things through it so I'm happy. But I haven't blogged, haven't cleaned house, and haven't done much jewelry making all week.

So here's to the end of the sale! It goes till midnight tonight. The above treasury gives you a taste of what's available. To the right is something new I listed, a Fire King cottage cheese bowl. To see what else there is, go to Etsy and search for evstsale.

Vintage Sale Time!

The only thing better than buying vintage on Etsy is buying it on sale--and now's your chance. August 8 through 17 will mark the first annual Etsy Vintage Street Team $12 and Under Sale.

Participating shops will have a wide variety of vintage goodies for $12 or less. To find them using Etsy's pull down search menu, click on "All Items: Tags and Titles" and search for EVSTsale. The sale lasts for a good 10 days, so check back--new items will be added as it goes along.

I'm not ready for this yet, but here's a little preview of something I added for the sale.

Garage sales: August '08

The middle of the country has many drawbacks, including no oceans and teeny mountains (yes, the Ozarks are mountains). But one thing we have in abundance is great summer garage sales. Hot, humid, crowded, and full of good junk at great prices.

Last weekend I hit a bonanza with two older women (now defined as anyone older than me) who were closing down their antique shop. I practiced great restraint and left with three bags full of goodies, including six vintage hats that I'll be listing over the next several weeks in my Etsy shop. The picture above shows some of my other finds, including a Red Wing Lexington pitcher, Red Wing planter, Hull swan planter, hand-painted Japan pitcher, tin of buttons, and a couple of trays.

These were great, but what really got me excited was the hats. Once I started looking at them, one of the woman started hauling them out of the house. And kept hauling--more than 50 in all. Unfortunately, many were not in great shape, but I picked out a number of the best. Pictured to the right: a rabbit fur felt number from Saks Fifth Avenue, probably late 1950s to 1960s. So soft, and it matches my eyes (but sadly not my head size).

Loving my readers

As anyone who has been here more than once knows, I'm not a regular blogger, not always an interesting blogger (maybe sometimes?), certainly a rambling blogger. So I am so impressed when the same people show up here again and again to see if there's anything new. Thanks to you all (as well as to those who stop by once and decide, meh, not for me).

Yesterday I created the above Etsy treasury to show my blog reader appreciation. (Note: I know I have some regular non-Etsy readers [hi guys], but they do a lot of lurking, rarely if ever leave comments, and really couldn't be included in an Etsy treasury. But I appreciate them too!) The most fun thing was visiting all these wonderful shops, which I'll admit I don't do often enough. So please visit the treasury and click around to see some fantastic art, vintage, and other items. I'll be switching out some of the photos throughout the next day, but still I know I'll miss some of you. Nevertheless, I appreciate you all! Thanks.

The vintage seller's alter ego

Vintage sellers are a creative lot. Even if they aren't directly involved in arts and crafts, they have "the eye." They have a finely honed aesthetic sense, able to pick out the wonderful lost in a sea of the mediocre and just awful.

Many of them, however, are also artist and artisans in their own right. I've found that a number of vintage sellers on Etsy have another shop where they sell hand-made items (often made with vintage components), or they carry a mixture of handmade and vintage within one shop. Here are just a few of the secret lives revealed (I'll highlight more in a later blog post).

AmbrosianBeads is run by Carol Holmes, the owner of RetroThreads. (You can see an interview with Carol on the Etsy Vintage Street Team blog.)

HerRoyalMajestyBags and SurrenderDorothy are products of the same creative mind.

backhomeagain is the crafty counterpart to 300nmulberry.

artsfarm combines vintage items with hand-crafted accessories, jewelry, and art in one shop.

Finally, AuntiePrincess moonlights as lamplighter, creator of extraordinary Victorian lampshades.

What's going on

I've been in a neglect-the-blog mode again, so here's my quick remedy: five things that happened lately (hope I don't have to pad the list):

1. I got a request from a writer to include a photo of my vintage California Pottery bells in an upcoming issue of an Israeli home styling magazine.
2. I won a pound of coffee from Vintage Indie for a photo I took of a coffee cup (one of my lovely Russel Wright chartreuse mugs, sitting on a napkin that I intend to list in my shop if I can ever find where I put the other three of them).
3. I became a contributing writer to the Etsy Vintage Street Team blog (my first interview is in the works). Just what I need, right? Another blog?
   
4. I found a photo of one of my necklaces on Gothic News, a website that is too cool for me.
5. I had my 6-month Etsy anniversary. The stats: 76 sales, 156 items currently listed in my shop, 1119 hearts, 2965 forum posts, almost 8000 Flickr views, and 2263 blog visitors. (There's something wrong with these figures--I talk way more than I sell.)

The Etsy Pledge

Etsy, whose tagline is "Your place to buy and sell all things handmade," is also host to a thriving community of vintage and supply sellers, including some wonderful shops that make the online experience like a comfortable trip to the very finest antique mall.

And then there are the others.

The ones who have cheap cameo bracelets they bought last week at Walmart. Or the sugar bowl that's not too bad, except it was made in 1994 (and thus not considered vintage by Etsy's 20-years-old standard). Or the skirts that were made in a factory in Southeast Asia.

What happens to these rulebreakers, these cheats--who contribute to the impression that Etsy is "an online flea market" (as one online columnist called it)? Some of them eventually get shut down (sometimes to reopen under another name). One of them I know of has made more than 100 sales in 4 months of business; maybe the boom will be lowered some day, but it does seem to take forever.

The community at Etsy is starting to fight back. This past week, the shop owner of Keys and Memories set up the Etsy Pledge Blog to highlight vintage and handmade sellers who publicly affirm that they "don't mistag or resell new items under the guise of being vintage or handmade." The blog already has 34 so-called Seal of Approval Shops (mostly vintage) listed and is adding more daily.

It's tempting, of course, to give you a link to those shops selling Walmart jewelry or brand new accessories. But maybe, if Etsy does its policing job right, by the time you read this they'll be gone.

Or maybe not--and there'll always be someone new to take their place. Caveat emptor indeed.

The weekend haul

Saturday I found some marvelous garage sales, including this one house of wonder that was packed, just packed with stuff--most of it good, some of it overpriced but some of it a great deal. There were two stories and a basement, and every single room was jammed full. The sad part: my older son was with me (he sells computers on e-bay, so he was making the rounds with me), and he was bored stiff and constantly on my heels, wondering why I was looking through a stack of old hats or rummaging on a table of pottery.

So I didn't get as much as I might have otherwise, but still found quite a few treasures. My son's just turned 17, and I don't see too much of him these days, so it was worth the foregone booty. But I'm still thinking about that house...wonder if they'll be open next weekend too (surely they couldn't have sold everything!).

Do I need a new model?

Things started out amicably enough. He was right there, usually in front of the TV or playing a video game in the basement, and always willing to help me out. He seemed to instinctively know the right way to wear my vintage hats--like a young Barbara Stanwyck, perhaps, or even Grace Kelly. That kind of elegance, that poise, cannot be taught.

Lately, however, I've been wondering whether I'm wrong to confine myself to just one model. I've had this happen before, you nurture their talent, teach them everything you know, and then one day New York calls, or Milan, and they're gone on the next plane without a glance back. To a life so exciting, even our new Halo 3 game cannot compete.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still happy with his work, but there's something I can't quite put my finger on. Some glint in his eye, a distance perhaps, that tells me he's thinking more about his next career move than my needs. Take these photos from our recent photo shoot--he starts out happy enough, but by the end... well, you be the judge.

Branching Out: The Pear Project

Beginning this week, I'm pleased to say that, in addition to my Etsy shop, some of my jewelry will also be available on the Pear Project, a website that carries a variety of goods made by artisans from all over.

Brooke Fuller, founder of the Pear Project, runs the business from her studio in North Carolina. In addition to being a savvy marketer, Brooke is a photographer, jewelry maker, and big believer in using recycled items (her bracelets made from repurposed tin are a great example).

"Artisan goods for everyday life" is the Pear Project's tagline. "A purse can come from a department store, or you can buy something unique that was made in a small quantity," Brooke explains. "Not only do you have a gorgeous bag, but you are also supporting an independent artist or craftsperson who is making a career out of what they love."

The shop carries bags and purses, household goods, jewelry, fine art prints, and paper goods "with a modern twist and utilitarian appeal, hand picked from a variety of submissions," she says. This is a small venue (one of its advantages), but it's expanding and constantly adding new artists and items. Here are a few of the other goodies you'll find there. (Guess which one's mine.)

Ways I can waste time

Like most other people (except those annoying overachievers), I have many, many ways of wasting time. One of them is curating treasuries, a collection of gorgeous and gorgeously photographed products available on Etsy. It's like my own mini art gallery, and I go back to look at it again and again, so pleased am I with the results. This is my latest one (available here if you want to go leave a comment).

Here, in no particular order, are another five of my favorite ways to waste time (for the complete list, you'll have to wait for my book...if I ever write it):

1. Get another cup of coffee, or heat up the one I already have.
2. Spend some time in the Etc. section of the Etsy forums, reading about someone's marital woes or participating in discussions on weighty topics (current threads--and I'm not saying whether I contributed to them!--include snorks vs. smurfs, cutest dog, dumpster divers, disgusting but true medical conditions, and anus waxing).
3. Watch the fights at the bird feeder.
4. Check the view counter to see how many people have visited my Etsy shop in the past five minutes.
5. Clean the house.

OK, that last one was a joke (my husband reads my blog). That's the kind of thing only an annoying overachiever would do.

Steam Team takes off

One of the fun ways of promoting your products on Etsy is joining a street team--a group of people with common interests, whether it's a locality, a medium, or a favorite cause. Some time ago I joined the Etsy Vintage Street Team, which has been a great way of meeting and learning from other vintage sellers. I recently joined another team, the new Steam Team, which includes artists and artisans in the steampunk genre. Some are like me, with only a portion of their stores devoted to items that could be considered steampunk, whereas others are thoroughly involved in both the art and the lifestyle.

And it's been fascinating, as you can see from the above treasury curated by ClockworkCrow--such a variety of approaches. There's gorgeous jewelry but also interesting artifacts and wild fashion. Keep an eye on their new blog for ongoing interviews and highlights from Etsy's steampunk community (plus, if you scroll down, some more of my cool postcards).

Bird fetish

"Do you have birds?" the woman asked me. I don't, but I was purchasing six vintage bird postcards from her, so I could see why she'd ask. In fairness, I also bought a polar bear, a beach, and a couple of wild futuristic air ships, but for some reason the birds were what attracted me most (many were set in Florida--maybe I just need a vacation).

These are a few of my favorites. The top one, a barn swallow, is from 1910 and was illustrated by the popular and prolific Ellen Nash. The two that follow are colorful linen postcards published by Curteich in 1948 (bird lady) and 1940 (flamingos).

Makes me want to get my binoculars and a ticket south.

Bloggers block (and other ramblings)

I think I'm getting worse at blogging instead of better. I started out with ideas and energy--what happened? Now I look at my last post and realize it's been a few days and think, aagh! What crap can I put up quickly?

In that vein: Here's a couple of necklaces I recently listed in my Etsy shop. More steampunk, yes, and fun to do, although I find myself in my basement sawing the pointy pieces off old clock parts, wondering if there's an easier way and also wondering why my children are so spoiled (or busy) that they turned down my offer to pay them to help (maybe this summer).

Recently someone on Etsy had a hilarious treasury (collection of artwork) saying that steampunk had jumped the shark, but given that most of the people you talk to are still unclear what it is, if they've even heard of it at all, I think we have a bit of time left before this goes the way of 70s shoulderpads. I figure I live in the Midwest, where people still wear Crocs. It takes a long time for styles to get here, even longer for them to go out of fashion.

Besides, as far as I can tell, it's alive and well. Witness the recent article in the NY Times, and now Etsy has a steampunk street team--a group of people who get together to promote a particular style or product. It's just now starting to get under way, but already has a blog and plans for a contest. (I'll have more on this later.) The more I see and read, the more fascinating the style is.

If nothing else, it gives me something to blog about.

Retro, kitsch, and cute: what's not to love?

The 1950s contributed so much to our culture, from the Big Bopper to poodle skirts. Much of it was something your mother might have called "tacky," "tasteless," or "junk."

The rest of us know better. The photos above (a picture of a Treasury, or curated selection of items, I put together on Etsy) show a few of my favorite figural planters from that era. Lambs were popular, as were swans and other animals (often hauling a wagon or something, where the plant went). Many seemed to have been designed as baby presents (which makes sense, during the height of the Baby Boom). Yesterday at a garage sale, I found a planter in the shape of a gigantic blue bow, a perfect gift for little Jimmie or Bobbie.

If you want to see more examples, visit the Vintage Figural Planters collection on Flickr (my own little pink boy is a recent addition). Cute, kitsch, and retro. Dig it.

Steampunk Style: Is WalMart Next?

Is steampunk going mainstream? A recent piece in the New York Times calls it "that rarity, a phenomenon with the potential to capture a wider audience, offering a genteel and disciplined alternative to both the slack look of hip-hop and the menacing spirit of goth."

The steampunk style, a neo-Victorian amalgam of a modern cyberpunk and the past world of Jules Verne--dirigibles and brass, high hats and lace--is stepping out of the shadows of places like The Steampunk Workshop and Etsy and into bricks and mortar stores like Gypsy Moon and the Bombay Company.

So if Target is the next thing to go steampunk, is that a bad thing? Jordan, one of the citizen reporters on the website NowPublic, poses this question in a recent article and has so far received a number of responses from his readers, most along the lines of "once these types of things get to the public eye, they are just over-produced and cheapened." (Jordan's article includes a slideshow of a number of steampunk designs, including one of my necklaces.)

Like everything else, if there's an interest in it and a way to make a buck, you can be certain that the retail giants will follow. So keep your eyes peeled--and tell Oprah I'm ready for my close-up.