Quiz of the week

This is an easy one: Guess where I'm going on vacation. Wish I could take you all...I'll bring back some photos (though I think I'll be fighting my son for the camera the whole time).

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.

My history in smoking

There was a time, I can't remember if it was high school or early college, when I smoked cigars. I mean, how cool was that, a girl smoking cigars. Wow, the people I must have impressed. I can still taste the nasty things, dainty little cherry-flavored chick cigars, the smoking equivalent of Boone's Farm wine. Then later, sometime after college, I took up the pipe. That was somewhat more refined, and I had (still have) some feminine pipes, a little metal cloisonne one and a purple painted wooden one. Neither worked worth a damn, and I remember the amusement of my uncle, who smoked a pipe for real, trying to teach me how to keep the stupid things going.

Neither of these habits was long-lived, fortunately, but I thought of them the other day when I was doing research on a new garage sale purchase--a beautiful antique cigar humidor. I was attracted to it because it's a beautiful box, a dark oak with a tin lining and a removable filter that could be wetted to keep the cigars moist. When I started looking around, trying to discover its age (1890s to early 1900s), I was reminded of the subculture that has grown up around different smoking options.

One of the most interesting websites I discovered was one that sells new humidors but also refurbishes antique ones to modern standards of cigar preservation. They take beautiful boxes like the one I'm selling (and, of course, ones much fanicer, made out of beautiful, rare woods with inlays and metal adornments and fanciful shapes), remove the lining; clean and refinish the wood if necessary; reline it with Spanish cedar; and fit it with modern moisture control devices (a humidifier and hygrometer).

Perfect for people who buy $10 cigars. (For those smoking cherry-flavored, girly cigars, a different receptacle will do.)

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.)

My Studio

The headline is a bit of a joke. I've been looking at other blogs with pictures of cute little cabins in the backyard, full of windows and light with ivy climbing the sides, where the artist can be an artiste. What I have here is a corner in the basement with a few shelves and a card table. But, on the plus side, the basement is three-fourths finished, a project we started and abandoned more than a year ago (and, if I had to bet, one that will remain undone until some time far in the future when we sell the house).

My basement also has a number of windows and a rarely used air hockey table that I can spread things out on (when I was growing up, it was a rarely used pool table; every basement needs something like it). So I can't complain. I don't imagine I'll ever get a little freestanding studio of my own, but if I can train my kids not to set their Nintendo controllers down in the middle of my work bench, at least I'll have my own little corner.

....And, on an unrelated note, here's a picture of a new necklace I finished this week. Why not?

My blog's smarter than I am

I just found out my blog is a genius. Yep, that's right. (Oh no. Did it just drop a few IQ points? Do geniuses say "yep"?)

Someone in the Etsy forums gave a link to a site that will rate the readability of your blog, from grade school to genius. The Blog Readability Test supposedly rates what level of education is needed to understand your blog. Of course, it says nothing about the quality of the layout or features, the value of the information, or the uniqueness of the views presented. And having a high level in the blog world is not necessarily a good thing.

I used to work on a professional journal where we thought it was fine to challenge the reader, even make them crack their dictionaries once in a while, but publications with a broader audience often find it necessary to "dumb down" the vocabulary and monitor the length and complexity of the sentences.

I'll admit I'm a snob though. I cringe (don't we all) when listening to speeches by our fine leader, still-President Bush, and it's sad to compare that with the level of thought and range of vocabulary displayed by your average person not fifty or seventy years ago. Our knowledge of words is contracting, and our patience with complexity has all but disappeared.

I could lament this sad state of affairs, along with the decline of the American newspaper and the quality of our education, but instead I'll share this quote by the great Nobel Prize-winning writer V.S. Naipaul: "There can be no showing off in literature. You want simply to be read." I think this applies to blogs as well.

Genius, shmenius.

Debra Drexler: The Pre-New York Show

My friend Debra is leaving in a few weeks for a one-woman show in New York at the Blue Mountain Gallery, but she held a preview for a few friends at her St. Louis studio. Debra's on sabbatical this year from her job as a professor at the University of Hawaii, so she's been splitting her time between St. Louis (home) and New York (opportunity).

Here's a few of her new paintings, from a collection she's calling Pool of Reflection (but another friend fondly dubbed Volcano Heads). My pictures are not that great (a little skewed), but the paintings are really striking--very large (as is most of her work) and with wonderful colors and movement. I'll be going to New York myself later this summer to catch the show (it runs July 8 to 26) and as many other New York sites as I can cram into five days!

A few other photos from the preview: Debra with a painting of the red tide, in honor of our ill-timed trip to Florida last fall, and
Debra in one of the hats I made her model for me (and I'm still grieving that they don't fit me).

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.