The Saturday sales

Oh yes. Saturday garage and estate sales, and I came home with a bunch of good stuff but nothing so cool as these hats. Upright Midwestern church-going hats these are (Methodist, I would guess, or possibly Presbyterian). The woman who sold these to me said she remembered her grandmother dressing in her little suits and gloves and then putting on the hat right before she went out the door. Neat as a pin.

I remember my own grandmothers (both Methodist) doing the same (though their hats are long gone), as did my mother for a time. My mother-in-law continued wearing her hats to church (Lutheran) until last year, when she no longer felt well enough to attend, and she loved the comments and compliments, especially when she pulled out the lovely fake leopard skin hat from the fifties. I've got a few of her hats now, but they're too small for me, whereas these lovelies came from another big-headed woman.

Big enough for my 13-year-old son (agnostic) to model for me, right before he took off for a boy scout car wash.

Now that's something grandma didn't expect.

Making the bears dance

A few days ago, in an argument in Etsy forums, the following concept was raised by vintage seller and seamstress PetitPoulailler:

“According to RG Collingwood, Principles of Art, what distinguishes the artist from the craftsman is that the craftsman has a precise notion of what she is constructing. The artist, in contrast, performs her creations to learn what they become. And in learning what they become, the artist informs herself about something previously unknown to the artist.”

It’s an interesting distinction—and not one that should be seen as a putdown for craftsmen. It’s just a different approach to the visual arts. I think the distinction can also be seen in literature. The writer of literary fiction begins with questions or a vague direction and ventures into the unknown, whereas someone writing genre fiction (such as mysteries) would begin with a plot—a detailed map of the journey and destination.

I would consider my own jewelry firmly in the artisan camp, though there is still an element of surprise and serendipity involved (plus what my art teacher mother would call "the happy accident"), which makes me think that the boundaries between these two ways of working are not always so clear cut. Even with a map, there is going to be the occasional detour or insight that pushes the piece in an unexpected direction.

One of my favorite quotations (only tangentially related, but I never get a chance to use it!) is by Gustave Flaubert:

“Language is a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes to make the bears dance, when what we long for is to move the stars to pity.”

Etsy Vintage: Play to Win

It's contest time! Well, I've never done this before, but Sunday June 1 my shop is going to be part of the Etsy Vintage Street Team scavenger hunt.

It's easy to play--search one shop for a clue, then on to the next shop. Everyone who completes it gets a code worth 25% off one item in any participating shop. There are going to be 16 shops in all, so that's a lot of vintage goodies to choose from.

If you want to play, you can find more details on the Etsy Vintage Street Team blog. (To get a closer look at the treasury above, go here.)

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.

Photo album: Memorial Day weekend

We have had the rainiest weekend--severe thunderstorms, marble size hail, and rain, rain, rain. In between showers, I've gotten out to a few parks and taken along my lovely camera.

On Saturday, before the rains came, Forest Park in St. Louis was filled with Old English sheepdogs--hundreds of them. My friend Lou, who is a lovely person but a questionable driver, stopped in the middle of the road, transfixed. Here are just a few of those big boys and their people.
We had lunch at the boat house and were going to go out on a paddleboat, until the deluge. These people got drenched but looked like they were enjoying it.

The next day, after the rain and before the hail, there were a few nice hours and we went for a picnic at Laumeier Sculpture Park.

It was a small group of friends--about eight people and five dogs. This is Bruno. Bruno was bad. Bruno's in time-out. There was a small debate as to whether Bruno saw the error of his ways and was thinking, "If only I'd been nicer to those other dogs."

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.

Flea Marketing

This past winter and spring, I've been going to estate and garage sales--some marvelous finds, don't get me wrong, but to get to that 50 cent Trifari pin you have to bypass outgrown toddler shorts, boxes of romance novels, yellowed Tupperware, and tables and tables of ugly coffee mugs. It requires perseverance.

Yesterday, in contrast, I went to an honest to god flea market in Belleville, Illinois, and oh my what a difference. Stall after stall of wonderful stuff--even if it was ugly, it was wonderful. Vintage plates and planters, hats, buttons, tools, weapons, souvenirs, costume jewelry, toys, postcards, pictures. It was sensory overload. I'd look at a table and only be able to really see three things, then have to look at it again to see three more. Fortunately, I was with friends, so we were able to point out to each other the treasures, the hideous, the absolutely laughable.

The downside, of course, was that most items were priced appropriately, meaning that I couldn't afford them. This was particularly painful when it came to some gorgeous bakelite jewelry, especially a translucent carved pin that looked like applejuice bakelite only green. I'm glad I was about out of money by that time.

So yes, I did manage to come home with a few goodies, including a cute cake cover, a little duck planter, a pile of postcards, and a tin of buttons (you can see some of them above, with my photography assistant, Stella). And it was interesting to talk to some of the vendors. Several of them said they had cut back the number of days they did the flea market to save on gas money back and forth. Many of them lamented the economy, and more than once the price came down as we walked away from a table. One woman told me her son said he was getting a tattoo as soon as he turns 18. Another showed me her Fiestaware price book and told me which colors are most valuable.

I won't give up on my garage sales, but it was nice to be in a place where people really knew and appreciated what they had. Even if most of it was out of my range.

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.

Will work for trash

I have a new plan for stocking my vintage shop on Etsy: I'll help you clean out your mom's house when she moves into that nursing home, and all I ask for in return is a trunk of junk.

Last weekend I did that for a friend of mine whose mother recently moved into an assisted living apartment. They'd already had the estate sale and were sending some items to a consignment shop (plus her mom was there, and I didn't want to look too much like a vulture), so I didn't get the best of the best. But there was plenty left in the Good Will box for me to pick through.

This was a woman who hadn't moved in sixty years, who liked antiques, and who had a bit of a shopping habit. For a couple of hours, I helped bag up clothes to give away (including some suits that had been in the attic for 40 years and crumbled to the touch), and I hauled some things to the garage. In return, I came away with milk glass, pressed glass, drinking glasses with Andrew Jackson on them (who wouldn't want those?), junk jewelry, old silver plate utensils, a few squashed hats, and another bag I haven't really looked through yet.

So call me. I'll even bring my own trash bags.

The substitute teacher

Today I feel like the substitute teacher who is a little lazy and a little overwhelmed, so she puts on a video and doesn't even mind if you fall asleep during it.

Today, class, I'm going to show you a few of my favorite photos that I've taken lately.

First, the pink dogwood blooming in my back yard.

Next, a few new buffed celluloid buttons. Note that the ones on the left and right in the top row look like little logs. How weird is that.

Finally, a new postcard in my shop. This one dates to about 1910 and is illustrated by Frank Reynolds. It's titled "Racing to Supper."

OK, class dismissed.

Moesewco's That Girl Hat

Can't you just picture Marlo Thomas wearing this with a little mini-dress and colored stockings? Or maybe Mary Tyler Moore, throwing it up into the air?

Emily of Moesewco has done it again. Her lovely little mod cloche, in a bright cherry red, features one of my funkiest little pins--a mixture of vintage buttons in chocolate brown, pink swirl, and red bakelite ball.

Emily's hats are entirely hand made--blocked using vintage wooden hat blocks and stitched by hand. So it's a good match for my vintage buttons, which hail from an era before mass production. I love seeing how artisans can take the styles and processes of the past and update them for today.

Seller's remorse (part 2)

Last night a nice son bought a pin from my shop for a mother's day present, and I'm thrilled that it will end up with someone's mom, and at the same time sorry that I sold it.

This pin belonged to my grandmother, Alice, a woman who was less than five feet tall but still imposing. She was a schoolteacher until they made her quit when she got married. She was a good cook and a perfectionist, which meant that cakes went down the toilet if they weren't perfect. (And why the toilet? A throwback to the days on the farm when she had an outhouse?)

I have vivid memories of her big house in Kansas City, where she always had one jar of baby marshmallows and one jar of chocolate chips; she had celluloid reindeer on her mantle every Christmas; there was an attic with holes in the floor over toward one edge, but trunks of old clothes that we were allowed to play with; and she always made the lightest home-baked crescent rolls and a green Jell-O mold with cottage cheese that my sister loved, but not me.

One of my last memories of her, and one of the most vivid, is driving with her into downtown Kansas City at about 40 miles an hour in the left two lanes of the highway. It was the last time I ever let her drive when we were together, though she kept her car (an old Dodge Dart) for a number of years, unwilling to admit she shouldn't use it. It was at least three or four years after that before she was finally diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

I have other pieces of her jewelry, but know I'll miss this brooch and memories of it pinned to her precise little suits. I'm starting a collection of her china though (Russel Wright in chartreuse) and I have her roll recipe, which I haven't made in years. Maybe I'll try it out again for mother's day.

Exploring memory

I just finished The Gathering, by Anne Enright, a marvelous book of a dysfunctional Irish family (does literature have any other kind?) that is told by an unreliable narrator--a grieving woman who freely admits that she's not really sure what did or didn't happen in the past that led her brother to walk into the ocean with a pocket full of rocks.

"We know that real events have real effects," the narrator says. "In a way that unreal events do not. Or nearly real. Or whatever you call the events that play themselves out in my head."

(The book is sort of like that throughout.)

One of the fun things about having kids is watching the unreliability of memory in action. It's much harder to judge where your own memory is playing tricks, since you don't always have the objective ruler to point out your errors. But with your children, as they retell the stories of their lives, you can see where they have conflated events, incorporated bits of movies or stories as their own, or simply made things up.

When my youngest was 3, we got a lab puppy for Christmas from our neighbors. But she wasn't ready to be weaned yet, so Christmas morning we wrapped up a picture of the puppy hanging in a stocking and gave that to the kids. Now my son is convinced, and I've heard him tell this story frequently, that they came down Christmas morning and Stella was hanging there by the fireplace. We've told him a time or two it didn't happen that way, but the memory--borne out of the picture--is as real for him as anything.

Now I'm happy to let that memory ride. As Enright's book shows, there are far darker childhood mysteries to deal with.

Pricing vintage

I've been buying and inheriting and coveting vintage items my whole life, but it's only over the past year that I've had to come up fair prices at which to sell them.

It started with my Barbies on e-bay--finding websites online that specialize in Barbies so I could look at their little butts and hairstyles and figure out what the model was and what year they were made. Then doing searches on e-bay and elsewhere on the Internet to get some idea of what they were going for, and how much it mattered if someone had gnawed off their fingers or drawn on a bra with red pen.

[Side note: My teenage son was helping me list these, and one of my fondest memories is of him bending down to take a close-up photograph of a Barbie butt. If only he hadn't had the camera, it would have made a priceless picture!]

Now for the past three months I've been selling vintage items on Etsy (in addition to my jewelry), and this has proved to be even more of a challenge, since I'm not a specialist and for each new item I need to find new resources. One of the first items I listed was a beautiful green dish with hydrangeas, made by Hutschenreuther Selb, Bavaria. First I had to figure out that the signature on the back said Selb, not Gelb (amazing how many e-bay sellers get this wrong). Finally after several hours of searching, I actually found a website (in German) that showed the manufacturer's marks and dates so I could tell that it was made before 1920.

Once I have a concept of the year and maker, then I need to do a search of e-bay, Etsy, and other online sellers to get an appropriate price. Seldom have I found the exact item, so a lot of it is guesswork. Fortunately, there's a great vintage community at Etsy, and they are a wonderful resource for relative newbies like me.

I can see why people end up specializing. Each new item--costume jewelry, a random leather purse, postcards, buttons--I've had to go through a similar process, and always I'm left wondering. Is this one of those Lisner necklaces that's worth $35 or $65 or $125?

You tell me.

My new necklace

I just finished a steampunk necklace on commission, and now I'm going to keep it. Sorry, Charmaine, hate to break it to you this way, but I like it too much to give it up (let's see if she can track me down).

Charmaine, aka High Desert Diva, sent me some of her grandmother's Victorian buttons, including a beautiful large black mourning button with crepe and beads. She also sent a box full of clock parts, and using some of those and some of my own, I put together a design for her to approve. The finished piece, above, is pretty much the same, with extra reinforcement in the back and a black leather cord.

It's going to look so good on me.

Losing that ace in the hole

I used to work in a bar, several different places at different times of my life, and I also had a brief stint as a waitress at a family restaurant, where I wore a poo-brown uniform and learned to hate all children and generally sucked. The kind of waitress, forgetful and stressed and six orders behind, that you pity and loathe in equal measure.
Still, for some odd reason, after that when I had jobs that I hated for one reason or another (and there always was one reason or another), I consoled myself by thinking, Well, if they fire me, I can always be a waitress again. I don't know why, but I saw this as my ace in the hole. I'd always be able to support myself, so there was no reason to get overwrought about the current situation.
I'm not sure when it dawned on me that this wasn't really so. Maybe it was some time after my back surgery, when I watched a waitress balancing six plates on a tray held above her shoulders like a giant flying saucer. No, I could not do this. In reality I never was any good at it, but now I am physically as well as temperamentally incapable.
I don't mean this to be a reflection on aging and loss, though it could easily go that direction. Rather, I mean to celebrate. I never have to be a waitress again! That possibility is off the table, and the other things that I can pursue--things that don't require me to pilot a flying saucer through a maze of tables while trying to remember who the hell wanted more catsup and why I have an iced tea pitcher in my other hand--these are much more exciting and satisfying possibilities.
Best of all, no uniform required.

Life happens

A week or two ago I was tagged by MelissaKate (who, by the way, has Willy Nelson on her blog this week), and I'd like to follow the rules and share seven random facts about myself, but I've done it a few times already. No one cares that much. So instead, I'm going to share three weird or annoying things that happened to me recently. In no particular order:

• My son found a mouse in the basement yesterday, which is no surprise since the kids leave food down there all the time. He took care of it; I won't go into details. Ewww.
• Some fun-loving teenagers heaved a huge rock from our garden through the back windshield of our car last week. Little pebbly shards of green glass everywhere. We're still cleaning up.
• My dog has epilepsy. She's had occasional seizures over the past year but had a big one this week, so the vet finally put her on meds, and she seems much better.

I'm sure everyone has a similar litany of gripes and distractions. But tonight I'm going to be a bartender at a fund-raiser for a friend who has cancer (pretty bad cancer) and no insurance. What is wrong with this damn country that people who are dealing with a life-threatening illness need to put their pictures in the newspaper and rely on friends and strangers for money? Anyway, it puts all these little things in perspective.

Peace out.