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.
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.
Have A Victory Garden Booklet
Last Fall I happened across a pair of WWII Victory Garden publications at a local estate sale, so of course I snatched them up! We love historic (and there for usually more natural) methods of cleaning, cooking, gardening, etc. making these a welcome addition to our home! I think I paid $6 for both booklets, which is more than I would normally pay, but they were in really good shape and I rarely see items like these anywhere. I think maybe these booklets and others like them were very common and so no one thought to save them or figured that they weren’t wanted anymore? I remember Loving Husband telling me that his Grandma Bertie had left him her ration stamps when she passed. He put them in a box in the attic with the rest of his keepsake belongings and went off to college. Then he came home to find that his older brother had thrown them away with everything else LH had owned in order to make room for his own belongings. The victory garden movement was HUGE in the United States and Britain during WWII. They were everywhere and almost 1/2 of the vegetables consumed in the US were home grown from what I understand. We have always been interested in Victory Garden style growing; Heirloom varieties, organic food production and historic farming methods. Now that it has become sort of popular, it makes it much easier to find information and products to assist you.
I’ve decided to share the Have a Victory Garden booklet with the world via a series of 5 PDF files consisting of approximately 15 pages each. If this book is well received, I will start with the next booklet, which tells you what to do with some of your harvest: Health-For-Victory- Home Canning Special Feature published in 1943. Below is a sample of the inside of the booklet.
Old Bookplates
I love reading and books and book related things. I always get a little tingle of excitement when I get a hold of an old book that has a pretty inscription, autograph or a beautiful old bookplate. Below are some really unique and pretty examples of historic bookplates that I found on Flickr. I plan to use some of them as inspiration to create my own personal bookplate in the near future.
1. [Bookplate of Meredith Nicholson], 2. Bookplate: Ship (Earl J. Dinges, DDS), 3. [Bookplate], 4. [Bookplate of Frey], 5. [Bookplate of Rene Dussaq], 6. [Bookplate of A. Dwight Stratton], 7. [Bookplate of Clara Meyer], 8. [Bookplate of Medicis], 9. [Bookplate of Francin Thibaudeau], 10. [Bookplate of Senor Ismael Smith], 11. [Bookplate of Dorothy Levey Rosener], 12. [Bookplate of Herman Theodore Radin], 13. [Bookplate of Helen Rollins], 14. [Bookplate of Hans Milly Witt], 15. [Bookplate of the U.S. Naval Academy Library], 16. [Bookplate of Geo. Hartley], 17. [Bookplate of the War Service Library], 18. [Bookplate of Clarence S. Jacoby], 19. [Bookplate of William Poillon], 20. [Bookplate of Elisabeth Zapff], 21. [Bookplate of Jacques Richepin], 22. [Bookplate of Frank Lester Pleadwell], 23. [Bookplate of Merle Johnson], 24. [Bookplate of Dudley C. Hasbrouck], 25. [Bookplate of Dorothy Harris], 26. [Bookplate of Albin Guillot], 27. [Bookplate of Imagerie Francaise sur des Themes Francais], 28. [Bookplate of J. Dupeyrat], 29. [Bookplate of Helen Blanche Dodge], 30. [Bookplate of Theodor Diller], 31. [Bookplate of Agathe Burian], 32. [Bookplate of Samuel Hollyer], 33. [Bookplate of Berenice], 34. [Bookplate of Arlo Bates], 35. [Bookplate of Louis Bougenot], 36. Bookplate
Coralie Bickford-Smith’s Book Designs
I wish that I had half of the talent of Coralie Bickford-Smith! I also wish that I had half of the gorgeous vintage inspired books she has designed!! Maybe you don’t recognize her name, but if you have read just about any style, design or book blog in the past couple years, I am sure you’ve seen her work! Bickford-Smith is the senior cover designer at Penguin publishers. I have some older Penguin books, and boy have things improved around there since she came on the scene! Let me show you some examples of her awesome work here in the New Penguin Classics clothbound hardbacks. You might have seen these at Anthropologie. Most places that carry them are always sold out of though, so maybe not. When we were in Memphis they had a copy of Cranford and a copy of Sense & Sensibility in stock and that was all! I love my OLD books, everyone knows that, but I would ADORE having a full set of these lovelies! The designs are so reminiscent of the look of books from the 1800’s. Wouldn’t these be a wonderful gift for a young girl who loves to read? I would have flipped for these when I was in my tweens! Not only are they a beautiful additive to any room, but they are good books too!
Another set of books that she designed and that I am in LOVE with is the six piece F. Scott Fitzgerald group with the metallic art deco dust jackets. The hardbacks under these jackets are black or white. I have several Fitzgerald (to whom I am distantly related to by the way, hehe) works that were printed in the 1960?s that I would gladly trade in for these! How beautiful! I usually take the dust jackets off of my books and keep them in a separate box, but I think that I would leave these on the books!
The final pieces of her incredible work that I wanted to share with you are the NEW, NEW, NEW Great Food series paperbacks. These books just hit the shelves at the beginning of the month and I am hoping to get my hands on some soon, if only to look at them at the local Barnes & Noble’s, so that I can give them a good once over! The books are reprints of old food related volumes and the cover images were taken from actual cookware or dishes of the period in which each book was originally written. How cool is that!? There are 20 books in the pretty set, but I’ve only picked my favorites to feature in the image below.
Free Reading Resources
I love to read, but I am also very thrifty. To me, the closer to free that something I want is, the better! While I LOVE real tangible books, sometimes you either can’t get your hands on the one you want even to purchase it, or you just don’t want to pay an astronomical price for them. Over the years, I’ve come across a few free resources online where you can acquire books and audio books for free and I thought that I would share them with my readers!
- The first on the list is the Project Gutenberg website which has over 100,000 books free for download. These books are in the public domain in the US and therefore are free from copyright restrictions. PG also has a wide selection of audio books to download as well. The audio books are not the quality of the type you would buy in a store as they are read by volunteers and not professional voice artists, but they have worked fine for me and come in a variety of file formats.
- The second is Google Books. If you select a category it will then give you the option for “Free Google eBooks”. Then just browse the titles, click on one and it will show up on the in-page reader. In the upper right hand corner there is a link to download the files as either PDFs or EPUBs.
- Next, Amazon offers a free Kindle reader for your computer or cell phone (I have it on my Blackberry). Once you have the reader, you can find TONS of free books for download in the Kindle store. The trick with the Kindle store is that unless you know an author that you’d like to look for, there is no way to just search for free books. You can either type in 0.00 and search that way, which honestly brings up a bunch of boring theory and economical essays first, and then search past all of those or you can try a book and see if it’s free. I have found many, many of the classics here for free because they are now in the public domain. I always have at least one Dickens on my phone in case I am stuck somewhere without a book! There is another site, Jungle Search, which will find all the free books for Kindle. Amazon will make you sign up with a credit card for an account or sign in with your existing account, but you are not charged at all for the free books. As I said, I’ve downloaded several and never paid a cent.
- Along these same lines, Barnes & Noble offers free books for their Nook or Nook app on your mobile phone; they only come in EPUB format though.
- Many Books is similar to Google Books and has thousands of public domain titles free for download in a myriad of formats.
- Munsey’s is just like Many Books but offers fewer file formats.
- Two places that aren’t exactly free but are close, are my beloved Paperback Swap and Goodreads. On PBS you receive two free book credits when you sign up and list 10 books, so essentially that is two free, in your hand, real books. From then on you can acquire more credits by sending out your listed books that others have requested. Then when they receive the book, your credit is good to select a book of your own to be sent to you free of charge. I have received some really exceptional books this way as has Loving Husband and we adore this site! Goodreads has a swap area that works very similarly, except as far as I know you don’t get the two free books and you pay the shipping cost for the book you want and whoever wants one of yours does the same. Media mail shipping is very cheap by the way.
- Then finally there are the bit torrent or P2P websites all over the internet that offer direct downloads of many types of things, one of my favorites being very old expired copyright books, magazines and manuals! I personally use Demonoid, because it is better organized and safer than places like Pirate Bay. There are many sites of this type out there and they are not just for illegally downloading. I have found many public domain books, public domain craft instructionals, etc. Demonoid only allows new members at one specific time of the month, you’ll need a code to join and I joined so long ago, I’m not even sure how to anymore! As I said though, there are several other similar places around the web, make sure that the user you are downloading from has been marked as reliable by the site and then of course as with anything online, read the feedback/comments first and have virus protection on your computer to scan the files as you download them.
Turn Paperbacks Into Hardbacks
I saw this project (above) by KatieDoh over at OhDeeDoh a while ago, but I almost forgot about it until now. I remember that I wanted to try it, but never did get around to it. I don’t know much about printing on fabric, so I might try to embroider the covers when I finally try this out. Until then, I thought maybe you guys would find it interesting and inspirational. If you make any of these, let me know, I’d love to see them! I always have so many paperbacks piled up that I have to find somewhere out of the way to store them because I can’t stand how they look on the self next to my hardbacks! This would be a good solution!
The Black Tower by Louis Bayard
The Black Tower
by Louis Bayard
9781616849481
HarperCollins
232p
I read The Black Tower simply because I liked the two previous Bayard books that I have read. He has a way of putting a huge twist and sometimes more than one, into the ending that you wouldn’t have guessed at in a million years. This book is no exception. The story is about the possibility that the son of Louis the 17th was switched out for another boy, the effort to prove this boy’s identity and finding a way to keep him alive. I won’t spoil it with the final twist, but it was so off the wall that I never even considered it! There are some pretty tense moments in the last half of the story; I actually found myself holding my breath as I read. If you like historical intrigue, you’ll like this one.
The Pale Blue Eye By Louis Bayard
by Louis Bayard
9780060733971
HarperCollins
432p
The Pale Blue Eye took me several chapters to really get into it. I almost gave up on it and indeed let it lay for many weeks untouched before I decided that I just had to finish it. I have this thing for leaving tasks uncompleted; it makes me crazy unless it’s really something VERY unpleasant (like reading A Lion Among Men). I am so glad that I pushed myself to finish this book! Once we reached the introduction to my favorite part of the book and who I would argue is the main character even though he’s not the narrator: a young Edgar Allen Poe! At the end they explain that of course the parts about him are entirely made up, but it’s still exciting to see one persons take on what his personality might have been like. I had one friend who always SWORE that she saw any twist in any book, movie, etc coming from the beginning, which I thought was a crock 80% of the time, but I assure you that if she said she’d known how this one was going to end from the beginning, she would have been a liar! Just when you THINK you might have it, new evidence is presented to implicate someone else. In the end, the culprit is someone that you would NEVER suspect for reasons you would NEVER suspect them. All-in-all I really enjoyed this book and its historical setting!
