freshvintage

Fill It Up for Five Bucks

A few weeks ago, I visited a antiques sale inside a huge warehouse. On the first day of the sale, I bought the enormous 1906 Webster's Dictionary and a breadbox with a glass knob. I spotted a few other things I liked, but they were priced a little higher than I was willing to pay. 

I returned the next day and discovered that I could fill a big shopping bag with anything that would fit in it for five bucks. They were really trying to get rid of everything.

Guess what? Both of these fans fit into one bag! Or at least the nice woman running the sale said that we could pretend they did. We didn't actually try it. They were priced at $10 each the previous day (which is still a good deal). Everything else in this post fit into another bag. All told, I spent $15 for the breadbox and dictionary on the first day of the sale, and another $10 for two bags of stuff on the second day.

The back of the dictionary has a reference to all of the illustrations found throughout the book.

This long metal container once stored old maps or artwork. I threw this into my $5 bag.

The old photo and Amish bonnet went into my $5 bag as well.

These 8x10 band leader photos from Washington, D.C. went in there, too:

As did the postcard packs from San Francisco:

And the stack of Wee Wisdom and Jack & Jill magazines from the 1940's:

Some of my purchases have already been put to good use. The breadbox can now be found on my kitchen counter. It looks like someone sanded all of the paint off of it, so it is nice and shiny now. I love the way it blends in with our stainless steel appliances.

No, I'm not using it to hide wine. Just bread.

And the Amish bonnet is the newest addition to the dress-up box in the kid's play room.

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To my American readers, I hope you have an enjoyable Fourth of July weekend!  My mom has an extra-special Famous Friday post to celebrate the holiday.

Sparkles for a Steal

So much fabulousness, I don't even know where to start...

Here's a pair of Lemaire Fabt Paris opera binoculars with leather casing. If these didn't say "Paris" on them, I probably wouldn't have bought them.

Three Horse Show Ribbons from 1949 in cream, pink and olive green. As soon as I saw them, I thought of this post on Andrea's Everyday Beauty blog. I scooped these up on the last day of a three-day estate sale in Delaware, when everything was 20% off. How could these have slipped through the cracks? They would look so cute hanging in a little girl's room.

A silver baby cup:

It is engraved with the name Jackie.

Jewels, jewels and more jewels. These were all from one yard sale in Oxford, PA. The woman had two long tables filled with jewelry. I picked up one brooch and asked how much it cost. When she said "a quarter", I grabbed the first container I could find and maniacally started filling it up with anything sparkly. There were a few other people digging through the jewelry, too, but I enlisted Finn and Maeve to stand on either side of me and form a barrier to prevent anyone else from swiping the goods.

When I presented the homeowner with this green Made-in-Poland colander filled with rhinestone jewelry, she got out her pencil & paper and began to add everything up.

Most of the necklaces and brooches are missing a jewel or clasp here and there. There are only a couple of pieces that are in perfect condition, like the sterling silver double-strand beaded necklace on the left, and the Weiss rhinestone and milkglass necklace in the middle.  

Do you see that long necklace towards the right side? Someone hastily sewed three strands of rhinestones onto a navy blue grosgrain ribbon.

The woman carefully picked up each piece and wrote down the price for each one. She noticed that many weren't in great shape, so she priced them at ten cents. The "nice ones" were a quarter. All told, I paid five dollars for the vintage enamel colander, the silver baby cup and twenty-two pieces of jewelry.

She even threw in a free "diamond" ring for Maeve:

It joins her growing collection of costume jewelry. These are clip-on earrings that we found a few weeks ago:

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I have an update on the BlogHer Community Keynote: my blog posts were not selected. Boo-hoo. The thought of speaking in front of 1000 people freaked me out anyway. It would have been so embarrassing to poop my pants in the presence of all of those nice blogging ladies. So, instead, I will enjoy listening to all of the other speakers, without any worries on my mind (or in my pants).

I've mentioned it before, but if any of you will be at BlogHer, please drop me a line. I would love to meet up at one of the many parties.

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Here are a few blogs that I have been enjoying lately:

This Young House - Get a glass of sweet tea vodka & lemonade and read through all of their archives. They documented the extensive (and inexpensive) renovation that they did on their little house. And make sure you check out their on-a-shoestring backyard wedding. Wow.

Moggit - Two funny ladies snark on ridiculous design ideas. I love how they call bullshit on major interior design mags and websites. A few examples.

Patina Green - A mother/daughter team of talented interior designers and antique dealers. Kaci & Luann have quite a knack for displaying their vintage finds in the two shops where they sell their goods. And, lucky for us, they share lots of photos of their displays.

On the Dot Creations - Julie has lots of great Etsy advice. Her free e-book is a must-have for Etsy sellers, or anyone thinking about selling on Etsy. Like me.

The Kitchn - I keep revisiting the same page over and over again, as if it is going to change. I need to make these or else I will surely die.

freshfind: vintage jack & jill lamp

Vintage Irmi Jack & Jill lamp with light-up well

Find more Irmi goodness on Flickr

Crazy Keywords, eBay Interview & Vote for Me

I finally wrote a new post on my freshblogtips.com blog about the advice I gave my mom when she decided to start a blog. I thought I'd celebrate by sharing some of my favorite keywords that have brought readers to freshvintage in the past few months (unexpectedly, I am sure). I've done this before, and they keep getting better.

I'm still not sure how some of these phrases brought people to my blog. Especially the first one:

• am i offending blacks with my clothing
• big tits wool clothes
• vintage clothing for traditional catholics
• you're dumb
• where do the crack whores hang out in charlotte nc
• wearing a maxi pad
• crack torch martha stewart
• what does a good stool sample look like
• beet stool samples
• woke up in pee mortified
• why feces smells like copper
• kathy lee sweet melting  
• indian son who likes his mother's tits & ass & also to see while she does pee-pee [wtf?]

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I was interviewed for an article on Entrepreneur.com about The Evolution of eBay. You'll find Gary from The Auction Rebel quoted in the article as well. So exciting!

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My sister nominated me for the BlogLuxe Funniest Blog Award. If you have some time to kill, go over and vote for me. Once a day. Every day until July 6th. You don't have to register or anything crazy like that. Oh - and you'll have to scroll through all of the unfunny blogs to find mine. ; )

The rumors are true.

My mother started a blog: BoggleMama.com.

It sounded like a good idea when I first suggested it to her. I even helped her come up with a name for it.

But I fear that I have unleashed a blogging beast. She has the potential to share an ungodly number of stories that could be very embarrassing to my siblings and me. In fact, I would say I am on the top of their collective shit lists right now.

If you love cringe-worthy childhood photos, tales of medical mishaps, brushes with famous people, and life stories of a former prostitute who braved it all to eventually become a loving mother of five children, then you will love my mom's blog. Okay - totally lying about that last thing. My mother was never a hooker. The only service she ever performed in exchange for money was Color Analysis.  I'm a "Spring".

No matter how embarrassing the stories may be to my family, they are sure to put a smile on your face. My mom is a crack-up and an engaging story-teller. And she is obsessed with reading all of the comments that people leave on my blog. So you can imagine how much she will love hearing from all of you on her very own blog. Please visit BoggleMama.com and give her a warm welcome!

Mid-Century School Chairs, Brownies & Ninja Maeve

Here are some finds from the last few weeks of junking. I spent $30 for everything in this post...

I bought these four Brunswick children's chairs for four bucks at a fancy private school's yard sale. It is difficult to see the colors, but there are two light green, one pale yellow and one beige. They are a little beat up - the legs have some rust on them. But the plastic seats cleaned up very well with the Magic Eraser. Love that thing.

They have that mid-century modern Eames-era thing going on. You know that I am not necessarily into that style, but that it is selling a lot these days.

And for the romantics, I found four hatboxes at a yard sale for six bucks. The striped one doesn't exactly have that same frilly look as the others, but it is from Strawbridge & Clothier in Philadelphia, so I had to buy it.

Howitzer is the 1943 January Yearbook of West Point. In order to get more officials in the field during WWII, the Class of 1943 graduated six months early, in January.

Set of French Language instructional booklets:

Here's a little metal box with drawers (and the remains of a floral decal on top). This is now Maeve's jewelry box because there weren't any toys at that particular yard sale and she was acting crazy and I didn't want to have to scream at her in front of everyone. And it was only fifty cents. A small price to pay for a few extra minutes of digging through good junk.

Her 57 big plastic Tinker Bell beaded necklaces don't exactly fit in here, so instead, she keeps tiny balls of brown playdough that she called her "brownies". Don't worry - I sniffed them to make sure she wasn't playing with her poop.

This small day book contains a log of workers and their payments from 1918. Next to the workers' names, it has their profession. On this page, you can see that Philip Fisher was a "Coppersmith".

I have to enlist some help from my friends for this one: Simone, a German living in America and Carla, an American living in Germany. (And any of my kind German-speaking readers who want to help.) What do these say? They are scraps of linen fabric embroidered with German words. It looks like they may have once been the edges of a tablecloth. Click the photo to make it larger.

And my favorite find of all: a wool Rothschild coat & hat set. In Maeve's size and in perfect condition . I paid $8 for the set.

That innocent look never lasts long. Two seconds later..

She looks like a blood-sucking, ballet-dancing ninja on her way to church. 

Talk about an ESTATE Sale!

I just made a quick after-work trip here. Looks like this family overspent for everything and it is biting them in the ass now.

Coming home empty-handed. Too much $$$ for me!
------------------------- Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

The Results Are In

You voted, and the funniest blog post is the one about my mom playing Boggle on the toilet. Yay for mom! Most normal, dignified people would be horrified at sharing their bathroom habits. Not my mama. She loves it. She is revelling in this right now.

So, I submitted the Boggle post to the BlogHer Community Keynote committee. Even though the hooker story was a distant second, I submitted that one as well. Call me crazy, but I think it is funnier than the Boggle story. I guess I am just immune to 20+ years of constant Boggle shaking. It's like when people ask the children of movie stars, "What was it like growing up around famous people"? And they say "It was no big deal - it was all I knew". I have the same sentiment. When people ask me, "What was it like to grow up in a house that had a Boggle game, notepad and egg timer next to the toilet?", I just tell them "I didn't know any different. But I could never figure out why my friends' moms didn't like to play word games while they pooped".

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It's Friday and I hope you are enjoying happy hour as much as we are right now...

 

Yes, we have a bar built into our deck. The Amish builder thought we were a little strange, but I didn't give a damn. It overlooks our neighbor's barn and the kids' swing set.

That's Chris drinking Sweet Tea Vodka & Lemonade. In a fancy girly glass.

Have you tried one yet?

Happy Mother's Day!

Big hugs and kisses to my mom for wholeheartedly agreeing to let me air all of her dirty laundry on this blog. My blog would be so lame without your embarrassing stories. I love you!

P.S. And thanks to my dad, who sends flowers to all of his daughters each Mother's Day. Thanks for the tulips! AND, thanks to Chris for planting my Mother's Day flowers in the backyard: peonies, roses and hydrangeas. My favorites!

Vintage Luggage Tags & Smoking Toddlers

I've been buying entirely too much paper lately. Here is a small fraction of the 800+ small vintage price tags that I recently bought. I put them in this small fish-scaled planter. It is only about five inches tall. It looks a lot bigger in this picture.

I found these vintage travel tags along with a pair of hotel keys on eBay:

They are from the 1950s to 1970s. I love the cruise line luggage tags.

 

When my in-laws were here in April, my mother-in-law and I went to a barn sale where I found a box of flash cards. There are about 40 sets of small 2" x 3" alphabet cards and one pack of large letters.

On the same day, Mary and I stopped at one of those antique stores that never appears to be open. You know - the kind that is attached to someone's house and you just can't tell if you are going to be raped and pillaged as soon as you walk through the door. And while you are worrying about your safety, you become distracted because the prices are so ungodly high for a place that looks like the living room of that hoarding lady from the Oprah Show. You know that kind of place, right?

Well, this place had a "bonus": a shed filled with antiques behind the shop. There were three reasons why I was unsure about visiting the shed after the owner had suggested it.

1. It was pouring rain.
2. The prices were too high.
3. I like my life and didn't want it to end in a shed, even if it was part of an antiques shop.

Our curiosity got the best of us and we went to the shed. It was crowded with furniture and boxes and other junk. I found a couple of scrapbooks in one of the boxes and paid $30 for both. I usually wouldn't pay that much, but in our brief look at the books, we spotted some cool stuff.

One of the books was filled with Valentines and greeting cards collected by a girl named Dorothea who was born in 1903. She only collected the nicest cards, with doilies and fold-outs and fancy tissue paper decorations.

This is one of my favorites:

Many of the cards are not in very good condition. They have tears or pieces missing here and there. But I imagine that some resourceful and talented artists could use the cards in their artwork.

There was a plastic bag of small floral scrap pieces tucked into one of the books...

...along with 30+ Victorian trading cards. Never glued and in great condition (for the most part). They are all from businesses in the Philadelphia and Montgomery County, PA areas.

Unfortunately, this trading card is in bad shape. The back of the card has an advertisement for a farm machinery supplier in Lansdale, PA.

Nothing says "Buy Our Tractor" like a toddler smoking a stogie and reading the newspaper!