Sweet Little Vintage Cottage On The Lake
When this is the view from your couch, who could be happy about leaving!? We just got home from our two week summer vacation in Chautauqua, NY. I was raised there and I miss it terribly! There really is nothing like my hometown. For two people who live a very nomadic existence, we’re both very attached to this area and would love to move here permanently, but the taxes are so high that we will have to wait and see. My brothers and my aunt live near here too and it would be nice to have someone we know live within 800 miles of us for once in our lives. We have had two GREAT weeks, but are now home in Wisconsin. Loving Husband fell in love with the area as well, and since my father wanted to go there to visit some family and friends this year, I found us a sweet little cottage near the lake in a little community called Wahmeda. I thought it was the cutest little thing and I wanted to stay there the moment I saw it online. It’s owned by a lady who owns a stationary shop and is a designer. Her wonderful taste can be seen in every inch of the vintage inspired home! There were so many perfect details; it was hard for me to get photos of everything. You can tell that each piece was lovingly selected and placed in exactly the right spot. We tried our best not to disturb anything during our stay. We loved our time there and were all so sad to have to leave and return to the real world. I can’t wait for summer vacation next year! To spite a mortal camera injury, I have a ton of photos to share!
Thrifting: Summer 2011 Auction Finds
I usually don’t buy jewelry other than a vintage pin here and there. However, we were at an auction and they were selling boxes full of old jewelry for $2 each. How could I say no? I bought two of the boxes. After I picked out the pieces that I wanted to keep for myself, I am left with a HUGE bag that I intend to sell as a lot in my Etsy shop. I don’t do jewelry making very often, but they might be useful to someone who does. A few of the pieces need a little bit of repair, but I have the stones that came out of them and will put them back in after vacation when I have more time. I’m going to figure the total cost of the pieces below at the $4 that I paid for both boxes. The vintage sunglasses were part of another box that I won for $7.
Another great auction buy for $7 was a box full of vintage fabric and linens. I’m only keeping (and showing you) half of what came in the box, the other half will be listed in the shop eventually. We also picked up a bunch of pretty cool misc items for just a few bucks. Where have you ever seen a chair for $3? One item that we loved but that isn’t pictured below is a small farmhouse style kitchen table that we were able to get for $4.
DIY Earring Hangers
Last weekend at an estate sale I purchased these two plaster wall shelves/frames. I’m not sure what these would have been used for originally because the wire mesh inside the frame is actually embedded into the plaster so it’s been there since they were made. I paid $3 each for them. Normally I wouldn’t pay that much for something that would sit a while waiting for a purpose, but I knew right away what I was going to do with these!
I’ve see so many people lately making earring hanger boards with old frames that I don’t really know WHO did the project first. I’ve even seen them in retail stores. I normally try to give credit where credit is due, but there is no way for me to know where this idea originated. Luckily for me, all of the parts were already in place and I didn’t have to do anything except to apply a little spray paint (Krylon royal red) that I had left over from a project that I did over 2 years ago. I’m going to say this cost me the $6 to buy the frames and not include the left over paint, but if you are buying new, it used about 1/3 of a can.
Stage Door Canteen (1943)
I’ve had Stage Door Canteen on my Netflix instant play queue for a while now and I finally decided to watch it this morning. The film is set in a serviceman’s club during WWII. The real Hollywood Canteen was the Stage Door Canteen’s West Coast counterpart. Both were staffed by a myriad of celebrities as is reflected in the cast of the film. It provided free food, entertainment and companionship to servicemen during the war years. The movie itself bounces between being really cute and really sad. The ending scene with Katherine Hepburn and the bride-to-be left behind when her fiancé’ suddenly has to ship out is particularly touching (and patriotic!) The only thing that this movie doesn’t have going for it is that it’s in black & white; I would have loved to have seen the costumes in full color. This movie wasn’t as strong on the costumes as I would have expected it to be, but the hats and hair styles are to die for! There are several scenes featuring the female volunteers arriving and leaving the club, so you get some really good views of period hats. With the volunteers and celebrities all dolled up for the boys, you get a non-stop parade of vintage hairstyles as well. There were too many that moved too fast to really screen capture them all. That is always a problem with screen captures, when watching you can get a good look as someone turns and moves, but trying to get a snap that isn’t completely blurry is next to impossible. The film also has lots of WWII era music and dancing. Never fear people, you can see it for yourself if you’d like… Of course if you have Netflix the movie is on instant play as I said earlier, BUT it is also in the public domain and is free for ANYONE to download and watch legally HERE from The Internet Archives.
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.
Kenosha Civil War Museum
You are probably thinking the same thing that I was! What does Kenosha, Wisconsin have to do with the Civil War? I asked myself that when we first moved here and I found out that they HAD a Civil War museum. We’ve wanted to go visit it since then, but it seems Loving Husband always works or we’ve just been lazy and never made it over there. Inspired by the History Channel’s Civil War week we decided to finally make the trip across town for LH’s birthday on the 2nd. I was amazed at how large the museum is and also at how well done it is. I’d say that it’s on par with the Florida Natural History Museum in the state capitol of Tallahassee. Other than two women and a small hand full of school kids, we were the only people there. I have to wonder how they A) were able to afford to build something like this in a small town like Kenosha and B) can afford to keep the doors open. However they manage it, I’m glad that they do, because we really enjoyed our time there. We met a nice ex-Navy man who was at the information podium. LH talked to him about how the Navy used to be back in the 40?s when the man was fresh out of boot camp. He loves talking to vets and hearing their stories, so he was in seventh heaven!
Once inside the museum, we found out that it is not only for the Kenosha area, but it represents the involvement of all of the upper-Midwestern states in the Civil War. The interior is supposed to be styled after a mid-1800?s fort and the second floor is a replica of a bridge (I forget the name) that troops from these states would have had to march over to get to the rest of the US and the area of engagement. We were lucky enough to visit during their temporary exhibit entitled Bodices, Bonnets and Weeds – Civil War and Mid-Victorian Fashions! A whole exhibit space filled with antique clothing, jewelry and accessories! I am so glad that my camera karma was good and that I was able to get a fewl good photos to share with you.If you watched the Gettysburg documentary I posted about a couple weeks ago, you will remember what a huge part Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes and his “Iron Brigade” (made up of Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry troops) played in many battles, especially at Gettysburg. Even though the upper-Midwest saw no action itself, men from all over the region did and this museum illustrates their lives and battles.
The museum has many great exhibits and events, including reenactments. If you are going to be in the area I would definitely stop by and spend an hour or so. Above is the beautiful view of the lake from the upper observation deck. It was rather chilly, but I thought I would leave you with this happy thought!
Vintage Handkerchief Pillowcases
I find cool handkerchiefs at estate sales all the time. They are usually priced around $1, so if they are pretty enough I scoop them up. Other than using them for their intended purpose, I think most people draw a bit of a blank as to what to do with them. I thought that they would make cute throw pillows, but they are a bit small for that; they are usually one foot square. I’ve been wracking my brain for cheap ways to add a few small touches of London to our bedroom, but any British themed fabric is outrageously priced, even a lot of the tea towels are far too expensive to cut up and use for pillows. As I was looking on Etsy for something cheap to use, I found a couple of London souvenir handkerchiefs! They were approx $5 each including the shipping, so I ordered them from their respective sellers. I loved the tone-on-tone white designs. They were quickly shipped and arrived safely. I already had my pillow design in mind and was able to start construction a couple of hours after the mail came.
Everything that you will need for this project is shown above. Halfway through the project, I discovered that my red ribbon had a pen mark on it, so I switched over to the white crocheted lace trim that you will see later. Any type of trim that you would like to use is okay, I was just using what I already had laying around. Whichever you decide on, you will need a little over a yard and a half of it. For my pillow I cut two 16X16 squares out of some heavy weight red matte satin. You could go larger or smaller, depending on what size pillow form you are going to stuff it with. You’ll need a measuring tape, scissors, your color choice of thread, a needle, a sewing machine (unless you are going to hand sew all of it), something to mark with and a 7 inch matching zipper. Of course, you also need your handkerchief!
Once you have your squares cut for the front and back of the pillow, take the front piece and arrange the handkerchief in the center of it, securing it with pins. I did a really fast whip stitch all the way around the edge of it to keep it in place. The next step is to apply the trim around this. You could do a simple right angle fold at each corner if you’d like, but I did 4 small gathers to create a ruffle. I also hand stitched this trim onto the pillow, making sure that it was secure. If you want to, you could use the machine for this; I just prefer to put my trims on by hand. Once this step is completed, it should start to look almost like one of those old-fashioned souvenir pillows, which is the look that we are going for!
Match your complete front up to your cut back piece making sure they are FACING each other. Pin them together so that they don’t slip. Now, head off to your machine! Sew up the sides, leaving an 8 inch opening at the bottom. Turn the pillow case you just made inside out and sew the zipper into the bottom opening that you left. I hand stitched mine and reinforced the ends because you know how hard it is to stuff a pillow into that small opening and we don’t want it ripping back open.
Once all of this is done, load pillow into the case, zip it up and fluff! The whole project took me about an hour because of the hand stitching; if I had used the machine I think it would have been closer to 20 minutes. I already had all of my pieces except for the handkerchief just lying around as leftovers from other projects, so my only cost was those hankies. Even if you bought everything new, I think you could come in under $10. I made two, one for each hanky. They just have plain red backs, but you could do a double sided version or whatever you’d like, really the sky is the limit on variations.
Shield Wall Art Revamp
These are two medium sized fiberglass molded shields by a company called Finesse’ Originals. They were filthy and the paint was chipping off of them like crazy. We acquired them from a garage sale last summer for the combined sum of $8 if I remember correctly. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them at that time, I figured maybe I would wash them and put them in Loving Husband’s Man Room. I was also a little iffy about paying so much for them, but they are decent sized and I had never seen anything like them. We brought them home and sprayed them down, but since they were still greasy dirty, we put them in the garage. They have lived in our garage for almost a year now. I remembered we had them, so I went out there and got them, sat down next to the shower, turned it on and started scrubbing them with a toothbrush. They eventually did come clean, but much of the already separated and chipping paint was lost in the process.
While they were drying, I decided to look them up online to see if I could find out more about the company and to get an approximate date that they were made. I found that the company was active in the 60?s and 70?s, as I had suspected and that they were known for these sort of over the top fiberglass wall art pieces. While I didn’t find any that were at all similar to mine or any that were a coordinating set, I did find a few of their pieces on Ebay. I was completely shocked to see them listed in a range from $300 to $2,600 each! I couldn’t believe it! While I doubted mine were worth that much because of paint loss, I was relieved to see that at least I hadn’t overpaid for them.
I thought about leaving them entirely beaten up and just hanging them on the wall in that state, but I didn’t like the heavy and “dirty” look that I was getting from all of the black background showing through. A little bit of dark showing would have been okay, but there was too much. I thought about painting them completely all one color like you see with so many accent pieces that are in fashion now, but I felt like some of the details would be lost. I wanted more color pops and more of the metallic shine. Once they were dry, I went digging through my paint reserves. I came up with a small can of Rustoleum American Accents silver metallic (not shown), a small can of Olympic admiral blue, a tube of Liduitex Basics cadmium red and a bottle of Plaid Folk Art warm white. The tube was left over from college; the blue can was bought as oops paint for $1 and the bottle was bought for 50 cents on clearance. The silver was bought at full price, but was left over from another project as was the paint brush. I used under $1 worth of paint, so I’m figuring the grand total cost for this project to be around $9.
I repainted the red parts red, the white parts white and any of the gold or silver parts that had chipped away I painted silver, blending into the gold where needed. I also painted the black background with the navy blue paint. I didn’t paint heavily so that things wouldn’t look cartoonish, but I allowed the background and brush strokes to show. It gives them an aged appearance without looking like they had been used as oil pans (like they did when we got them). We hung them staggered on the wall to the right of the larger window in the bedroom. They are so different and unique; we are very happy with them and how they turned out!
Far From Heaven (2002)
To be truthful, I had never heard of Far From Heaven until about a week ago. I’ve never seen it posted about on any other blogs; I don’t remember any commercials for it, nothing. The cover caught my eye while I was browsing the Netflix new arrivals and I took a closer look because I thought it was Gillian Anderson. Turns out it is actually Julianne Moore. The description said “1950?s”, so I had to investigate further! I had nothing better to do at the time, so I sat and watched it. The movie was really pretty good. Moore and Denis Quaid play a picture perfect Connecticut couple. As it goes, the husband turns out to be gay and Moore’s character falls in love with her dead gardener’s son (who happens to be African American). While the homosexuality remains a secret, rumors spread through the town like wildfire over the interracial friendship and she is forced to cut all ties with the man. Everything seems to be running smoothly until they take a New Year’s vacation in Miami and Quaid falls in love with a young man with whom he starts an affair. Before long he’s having a nervous breakdown and asking for a divorce so that he can go be with the boy. Moore takes everything he dishes out, from him hitting her to him leaving her and the kids, with incredible grace. She finally decides to tell her love how she feels and that she can now be with him. His daughter was attacked and beaten with rocks by a little pack of white boys, and he has decided it is best for her if they move away. Moore meets him at the train station, but is turned away in the end. While the story itself is really sad, it was a pretty good film. The decor, props, cars and especially the costumes are awesome! I’m surprised that I haven’t read more about this movie on the vintage blogs! The clothes are such beautiful colors, made with gorgeous fabrics and have so many fine details! The images below are screen captures that I took to show examples; they can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Before I get to the costume photos, I had to share this hat with you! As I was watching the film I noticed that one of her hats looked awfully familiar! Her lavender hat is the same style as my pink hat! The one in the film is missing the front net and is a different color, but other than that, they are the same even down to the velvet bows and the scattered rhinestones! I thought that was SO neat that I had to point it out!
One final image that I wanted to show you, is the car that is featured several times in the film… It’s my Dream Station Wagon! Nice bike too!
Pink Vintage
1. Pink Dream Dress, 2. Pink Atlas Sewing Machine, 3. Pink Pussy Willow Vintage Cannisters, 4. Victorian, 5. Pink Victorian gingerbread house, 6. Vintage Barkcloth Red and Pink Roses, 7. Historic Redwood Empire House P, 8. Pink Victorian, 9. Pink 1969 Camaro, 10. Pink House, 11. Pink Venetian mirror…, 12. Perfectly Pink, 13. Vintage pink bicycle., 14. French Baby Coat … Em’brd. Silk & Valenciennes Lace ca. 1910-15, 15. …it’s like, ROYAL., 16. pink gown, 17. Antique Jewelry Box -Joyero Urna Vidrio y Ormolu con Cojín Capitoné de Seda Rosa siglo XIX 2, 18. Pink, 19. three decades of pink, 20. Sewing Machine, 21. OldAugsburyHome, 22. french vintage corbeille pink deep buttoned bed in the sun, 23. REWORKED ANTIQUE FRENCH PINK CHAIR, 24. Untitled, 25. The Cupcake House.
