Thrifting: Winter 2012
I haven’t been writing my regular thrifting posts as I used to, so I have a few months worth to catch up on with this entry. I figured that I had better not wait any longer before I became overwhelmed trying to remember what everything cost me. Items that I have bought for the shop are not included in this (or any) of my thrifting posts. Yesterday morning we went to a nice estate sale. I was after a couple of mid-century modern Dansk pans, but the guy who’s wife sent him to sit in the freezing car at 5am so that he could be the first on the entrance list got to them WAY ahead me! We still found some pretty interesting things though. The best part was the house itself; it had 1950′s appliances in the kitchen and a section at the back of the library that was a step down into an area of loose gravel flooring. Often times the house can be more worth waiting in line than the contents that are for sale. I was overjoyed to not only be able to get this shelving unit above before any other thrifter did, but to get it for only $10! Each shelf is slightly larger than the dimensions of a piece of paper and they start out at the bottom being 3 or 4 inches apart and slowly graduate to wider separations at the top. There are 28 shelves not counting the bottom. It is all handmade and meant to be recessed into a wall. All I need is a little paint and to put a back on this and it will be the PERFECT edition to my craft room at the house… especially when paired with my vintage pattern case below!
I’ve had pretty good luck finding awesome and inexpensive craft room items. Take this aqua blue 1967 Singer 347 sewing machine made in Great Britain for example; it still works great and is used as my back-up machine. I bought it at a little local flea market for $24 and it cleaned up brilliantly!
If you are interested in seeing some of the other great finds I’ve made, I’ve provided a gallery below.
Vintage “See America” Posters & Free Printable Bookmarks
I do LOVE these vintage “See America” posters! I’ve already voiced my love of vintage travel posters and of course, American destinations are some of the coolest. The depression era art style of these posters below is beautiful. The originals are worth a small fortune if you can find them, but you can buy reprints from several places on the internet. One of those places gave this little snippet of background info on the pieces:
WPA Posters ( Works Progress Administration) were made during the WWII Era between 1936 and 1943 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. They were designed to publicize health and safety programs; cultural programs including art exhibitions, theatrical, and musical performances; travel and tourism; educational programs; and community activities in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. The posters were made possible by one of the first U.S. Government programs to support the arts.
I liked these images so much that I made them into a set of four bookmarks that I printed out from my computer. I’ve posted them below for anyone else who would like to make them as well. Right click and save the image to your computer for future printing. All you’ll need is a color printer, scissors, a whole punch and some baker’s twine. Once they are printed out, cut along the edges to separate them. Punch out the hole where it is shown at the top. I laminated mine, which I would recommend, especially if you have an ink jet printer and not a laser printer because if it were to get wet the ink would run. Once they are laminated, you can loop the twine around once and tie it or you could tie on a tassel or something decorative. For step by step instructions for making a tassel, visit this page at Martha Stewart Crafts. If you would like to use ribbon instead of twine you can. I preferred the look of the unbleached cotton twine for this project, but please feel free to make it your own. The image is larger than it displays here and will print as a full page.
Rosette T-Straps by Chie Mihara
I posted about these lovely vintage-look t-strap heels by Chie Mihara a while ago on another blog. I love the fabric, color and overall look of these shoes. I wanted to update the article because of a post I recently read on Elegant Musings about vintage shoes. In her post she displayed a vintage shoe ad that pictured a pair that I immediately recognized. The first pair shown in the top image of her post are strikingly similar to these Rosette lovelies you see here. I LOVE seeing clear vintage influences in modern fashion! These are available at Neiman Marcus and have recently been marked down from $390 to $175.
Vintage Beauty: Grace Kelly
Grace Kelly‘s name is synonymous with beauty and elegance. Her looks were always simple and fresh, never gaudy or over embellished. Is it any wonder that she married a prince? She started out her life as one of four daughters in an affluent Philadelphia family that was filled with politicians, Olympians and showbiz players. Her life progressed through a line of prestigious schools ending in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She moved on from an early modeling career and straight into Theatre. Soon Kelly was a regular star of television which lead to the motion picture roles that we all know her for today, including her Academy Award winning performance in The Country Girl. In April of 1956 she became Princess Grace after marrying Rainier III, Prince of Monaco. Three children were soon to follow and in 1982, it was her daughter, Princess Stephanie, who was with her as she drove her car over a cliff after suffering a stroke. Both survived the crash, but Grace passed the following day as a result of the stroke. We not only remember her today for her effortless style and timeless beauty, but also for her many charitable efforts, including The Association Mondiale des Amis de l’Enfance and The Princess Grace Foundation.
Black Forest Cupcakes
One of my favorite desserts is Black Forest Cake! This chocolate & cherry cake is known as Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte in its native Germany. Schwarzwälder, meaning “Black Forest”, describes the region of Germany where this dessert originated. The Black Forest was named by the Romans who referred to it as such because the forests were so dense that they blocked out most of the sunlight, making them very dark. The Black Forest region is in the southwestern corner of the country in the state of Baden-Württemberg. I’ve marked the forests on the map below with red stars. The Kirschtorte half of the name comes from the traditional inclusion of an alcoholic liquid called Kirsch, made from distilled cherries. A torte is a cake. When you put it all together you get Black Forest cherry liquor cake, and in fact, in Germany you can’t market the cake AS a Black Forest Cake withOUT the liquor. Our recipe contains no Kirsch and is completely non-alcoholic, but feel free to add it if you’d like. This Americanized version still contains the chocolate cake, cherries and whipped cream that make it so delicious!
I know that a lot of parents read my blog and can be very busy or sometimes have restrictive schedules; because of this we made our recipe with a boxed chocolate cake mix. If you have ample time and wish to make your cake batter from scratch, we recommend Martha Stewart’s basic chocolate cake recipe. More time saving measures would be to skip the fresh cherry preparation and the homemade whipped cream frosting and to instead use canned red tart pie cherries (1 & 1/4 standard size cans should do) and/or pre-made whipped cream. However, for best results you should always use fresh ingredients and start from scratch!
Ingredients
- 1 boxed chocolate cake mix – prepared to bake or one recipe homemade chocolate cake ready to bake
- 2 Cups fresh cherries or 1 & 1/4 cans cherry pie cherries
- 1/4 Cup granulated sugar (if using fresh cherries)
- 2 pints heavy whipping cream or pre-made whipped cream
- 2/3 Cup confectioner’s sugar (if making your own whipped cream)
- 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
You Will Also Need…
- non-stick baking spray or baking cups (paper or silicone will do)
- cupcake/muffin pan
- melon baller
- pastry bag with your choice of tip
- hand mixer (whisk beaters are a plus)
- glass mixing bowl
Directions
If you are using fresh cherries, pit and half fruits the night before you prepare the cupcakes. Sprinkle 1/4C granulated sugar over 2C of cut cherries and mix to disperse evenly. Cover with plastic wrap or lid and refrigerate overnight. This process is known as maceration and is intended to soften or break down the fresh fruit while drawing out the juices at the same time.
Prepare chocolate cake batter as instructed based on which type you chose to bake; box mix will have instructions and ingredients list on the packaging. Once batter is ready to bake, either spray the cupcake pan with non-stick spray or line it with baking cups. I personally find the cups easier to clean up after as the spray can tend to bake onto the pan. Fill the cups evenly 3/4 of the way and bake at temperature and for time suggested in respective instructions.
When finished baking, remove the cupcakes from the oven and allow them to cool. While cakes are cooling, place macerated cherries in a medium saucepan along with the extracted juices (and Kirsch if you are using it) and sauté until fruit is soft like pie filling. If you are not using fresh cherries, this would be the right time to open your cans of cherries. Right now you should place your mixer beaters and your glass bowl in the freezer for approximately 30 minutes to get it nice and cold before you start your whipped cream frosting. If you are using store bought whipped cream then skip this and go on to the next step.
When cupcakes are cool enough to handle, remove part of the top center of each cake, leaving a cavity into which you will put the cherries. I have seen many people do this using a small cylindrical cookie cutter; however, we have found that the quickest and most efficient way to remove this part of the cupcake is to use a melon baller. We save & freeze or snack on the removed parts of the cake because it’s a shame to waste good chocolate!
After you have made space in each cake for the cherries, spoon the fruits into each opening until the top is level and ready to be frosted.
Remove the chilled beaters and the glass bowl from the freezer. Place heavy cream, vanilla and 1/3 of confectioner’s sugar into chilled bowl and whip with mixer set on high. Once combined, slowly add the rest of the sugar until soft peaks begin to form.
When you are satisfied with the consistency of your frosting, spoon mixture into pastry bag and pipe desired amount onto each cupcake. Decorate however you wish, I use a little shaved chocolate.
Buttons, Buttons! Who’s Got The Buttons?
If you are anything like me, you LOVE vintage sewing supplies, especially buttons! This mess (above) is what my button hoard started out as. To be honest, I really didn’t think that I had THAT many buttons. So many colors and styles, the list of possible uses is endless, I guess that’s why I never throw any of them away. Three years ago it was pretty much limited to what came as extras when I bought a new piece of clothing and a few that I had salvaged off of clothing that was too far gone to be donated. A “friend” (at the time) gave me a bag of tan and grey buttons and I hit a streak of REALLY good luck at thrift stores and garage sales. Then we went to the huge flea market in Elkhorn, WI where I was able to find a bunch more to add to the pile. We went to an antique store where I bought a giant glass jar of vintage and antique buttons for $8. Many of those were bone, real mother of pearl and glass. When they had the floods in Tennessee last year Loving Husband had to go down there for two weeks and basically keep watch over a room full of servers with important info on them because the people who normally worked at that base were trying to clean up their homes and he had the right clearances and such to be trusted to do that. When they finally came back to work and were cleaning up their flooded offices, they were mostly throwing away anything that wasn’t very important. He noticed a box FULL of the big black peacoat buttons with the anchors on them. He remembered that I had bemoaned the extortionist prices that people want for them on eBay/Etsy and asked if he could have them since they were just throwing them away and they said sure! So that added 50 more buttons to the list and even in recent months I’ve been able to pick up whole baggies of buttons (like 110 brass buttons for $1) for next to nothing. Even with several large scores, it just didn’t hit home just HOW many I had until I decided to try to organize them and gathered them all into one place.
Boy oh BOY! What did I get myself into!?
Like most things that take me a week or more to do, it is something that I needed to do for my own good. I tried to organize them into baggies once, then into jars, then onto cardstock sheets, then individual cards. There were just too many! I had so many different styles that none of these options were working to my satisfaction. It always ended up as a disaster that spanned several locations around the craft room, but I wanted them centralized. I was sitting here wondering what I could do that would make it easy for me to see them ALL without having to go through bags, jars or cards, but wouldn’t take up a lot of space. I finally decided to keep them in a binder! I took card stock and began sewing my buttons to the pieces of paper by groupings (if they were the same or individuals.) Once I had two cards finished, I used a hole-punch on each piece and taped them together (back-to-back) around the outside edges of the sheets. This made the cards stronger and kept the threads holding the buttons onto the sheets from getting caught on the buttons of the following page. Then, I just put the pages into a 2.5 inch 3-ring binder. I did have to keep a small box for baggies (about 5 or 6) that contain buttons that I have WAY too many of to sew to the large cards. For example, I have 190 standard 2-hole white glass buttons; those are in the box (see below).
The pages inside of the book still look a little on the chaotic side, but with 1,105 buttons that had to be sewn on to them; I was getting rather tired of the job early on in the project. All together I ended up with 1,666 (HA!) buttons that I am keeping. There are about 600 that I will be listing on Etsy in 4 lots and another 375 that I will be giving away in the near future.Below are photos of each sheet so that you can see all of my buttons. For a detail view, you can click the images to enlarge them.
Joyous Jellies!
As I was clearing off the DVR and catching up on old episodes of The Martha Stewart Show, I spotted an episode description that said “Jelly Mongers”. I’ve been in a canning mood this summer, so I figured this would be something informative for me to watch. Well, it turns out that it WAS very informative, but it also turned out to NOT be about canned jelly. Of course the “jelly” referred to was Jell-O basically. I know from my studies of historic culinaria (and endlessly watching British movies and TV shows) that at one time (as far back as the Victorian era) Jell-O was VERY popular across the pond. Even here in the U.S. gelatin had its time in the sun, but I think that ended at about the time that I was born (late 70′s) and the Technicolor jigglers are now pretty much the domain of toddlers and drunken college girls. I remember my father being the king of fancy Jell-O when I was small. He would float all manner of chopped fruits in the green and orange goo. He had this Tupperware mold in the shape of a ribbed bowl that had interchangeable disks at the bottom. Once the gel had set and the mold was inverted, you would have any number of holiday related symbols set into the top of your mound. It was really rather neat, but I have no idea what happened to that bowl. I use decorative copper molds that cost me between 50 cents to $1 each at thrift stores.
On the Martha episode they made even fancier combinations than anything my father tried. The two Jelly Mongers, Harry Parr & Sam Bompas, even create their own molds. Even though the guys weren’t as friendly to Martha as I would have liked, I still loved their work and wanted to try one for myself. Of the two recipes they shared on the show, I chose to make the Champagne & Summer Fruit Wedding Jelly over the Raspberry & Crème Ribband Jelly. You can watch the segment about these here. If you like the idea of making some really creative jelly molds as much as I do, you can check out their book, Jelly Mongers: Glow-in-the-Dark Jelly, Titanic Jelly, Flaming Jelly. I see a million cool books around the web, but I think I might actually have to add this one to my Christmas List!
For our experiment we used very cheap champagne; I think the bottle cost $5.99. I wasn’t about to waste the good stuff if this happened to not work out for the best! We were also unable to locate the gelatin sheets that they used on the show. I used 2 packages of unflavored gel powder per 2 cups of liquid. The only fruits we had on hand at the time were raspberries and blueberries, so we used a lot of those to compensate for not having any strawberries. We don’t have a dome mold like the one used, so I used one of my ring molds.
Victory Garden Embroidery Patterns
Part of my summer of organization includes decorating parts of the apartment that have been barren since we moved in a year and a half ago. One of these areas is the kitchen. So far the whole thing has just been plain white. It’s painted white with white appliances and I have white tie shades on the windows. It’s a small kitchen, but we do have a little dining nook where we sit to eat dinner. I’m getting so tired of looking at the blank walls! Because Loving Husband is the main chef in the house, I don’t want to go with décor that is too feminine. We’ve been planning on replacing our cookware with something green or gray (in color), but I still love the vintage white look. I didn’t know what to do for a color scheme because sometimes I come across objects for the kitchen that only come in one or two colors and none of them are green or white… so I needed an idea that could accept a rainbow of possibilities if worst came to worst. Since we are both big history buffs and love our heirloom garden, we decided to go with a WWII Victory Garden theme. I LOVE Victory Garden stuff and this theme allows us to pretty much include any veggie or farm related piece we would want to.
Today’s post is focusing on customizing Chef’s towels. I LOVE vintage needle work and embroidered tea towels. I have a TON of cute vintage veggie themed patterns, but I wanted to incorporate a few of my own. My biggest inspirations for this whole room are the WWII Women’s Land Army and Victory Garden posters. If you are unfamiliar with what I mean, you can find examples here and here. The second is a great exhibit called “Beans Are Bullets” that even has period videos. From looking at these posters for a while I found a few emblems and logos that really caught my eye and I turned those into embroidery patterns for my own use. I have decided to share them with you, my readers. Just right click to save the images to your hard drive, then print them out or trace them onto wax paper, pin it to your fabric and embroider away!
The Food for Freedom image was taken from a U.S. Dept of Agriculture poster and the C is from the U.S. Crop Corps (Women’s Land Army) campaigns. The V for Victory with the basket of produce (below) is from an ad for the National League of Wholesale Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Distributors. I did a quickie job embroidering this one on a hankie just to show you what it looks like when it’s completed (at top). I hope you enjoy the patterns!
WWII Navy Photo Scans
If you are a regular reader then you know that we love estate sales and auctions, we obviously love the Navy and you may or may not know that WWII is one of our favorite time periods. Loving Husband is very interested in preserving WWII Naval history and loves anything that has to do with our veterans. While we were in New York this summer all of these combined and the result is this gallery of photos! He saw a WWII photo album up for auction in Buffalo, so we made a special trip up there during our vacation to try to purchase it. After much back and forth bidding, we emerged victorious at $4 under what his bidding limit was (I will spare you the horror) and we brought it back home with us.
Our plan when we see old military photos and buy them is to scan, restore and upload them to the internet. We hope that by networking on veterans’ websites and forums that we will be able to “reunite” these digital images with the people in the photos or their friends and family. It always kills me inside when we go to an estate sale and end up being able to buy their grandpa’s Navy boot camp photo off of the wall for what they think the frame might be worth. How anyone could toss such things away without a thought is unfathomable to me. When so many people would LOVE to have a photo of their grandparents or parents during the prime of their lives, so many people trash them without a thought. *sigh* Oh well, that’s when we swoop in and give these items a good home. What started out as a gut feeling that we needed to buy an old photo has turned into quite a collection now! It took me a couple of weeks to get into the right mood to sit up all night scanning and cropping this set, but now it’s done.
I have no idea who these men are, if you know who any of them are, PLEASE leave me a comment and let me know! I do know that they were stationed on the USS Patoka (AO-9) during the 1943/WWII time period. I’d love nothing more than for some of these digital copies to find their way to people who will cherish them!
I’m not sure who all of the people are in the four photos below, but I know that the sailor is Leonard James Polinski, the owner of the album. I love the ladies’ hats and coats!
I think I’ve saved the best photos for last: The Shellback Ceremony!
For those of you who don’t know, the Shellback ceremony is a Navy tradition for sailors who are crossing the Equator for the first time. They give you a certificate after you dress up and do a bunch of embarrassing stuff. The certificates that sailors get now-a-days are WAY more ornate than the one that poor Lenny Polinski was given, which you can see a scan of in the gallery below. You almost never see photos of the ceremony, especially OLD ones. These are actually so rare that they are what sparked Loving Husband to go after the album in the first place! You can enlarge the images by clicking on them.
1950′s McCall’s Fashion Scans
I’ve been trying to clear up a bunch of little tasks around here that I’ve wanted to do for a while. One BIG task was cleaning up my computer files. While doing that, I came across these fashion scans from a 1950?s McCall’s magazine that I intended to post about a while ago and never got around to it. I love 1950?s fashion; I think it’s the tailored tops with the puffy bottoms. With random magazines I will usually cut out or scan the images that inspire me and then pass it on to someone else, but this issue is older so I decided to scan the parts that I wanted to keep and then I’ll sell or giveaway the original magazine.
