I often wonder about the new homes for the vintage treasures that we send. Taryn paired a 1950s mirrored filigree vanity tray with painted ball jars and then added a glass knob. . . . what a great new look for a vintage tray.
Inspiration: First Comes Love
Songs and stores from childhood are simple which is why we are able to learn them quickly and recall them years later. Like this one: Jack and Jill sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G First comes love . . . then comes marriage . . . then comes Jack with the baby carriage. Boys and girls…
The Spirit of the Gift: A Box of Chocolates
Tucked in an old trunk, an empty box of chocolates with an inscription, Kenneth's first box of chocolates given by Uncle Darrel Sept. 7, 1926. The old box is fragile; it was constructed of paper but, it had survived over the course of eighty-eight years! I imagine that Kenneth left the box behind when he…
Lust and Vintage Linen
I am not sure how it happened. It all started in Missouri almost forty years ago . . . going to auctions and finding beautiful linens . . . looking for linens that were not polyester . . . finding vintage linens so soft, so detailed . . . handmade by women who cared about…
Vintage Fashion
I have been watching The Paradise on PBS; I admit that I began watching it as a fix. I missed that other series about Mr. Selfridge. Imagine, all the way from Marshall Field to London. The spirit of the age (the Zeitgeist) is palpable in both series - the optimism in modern science, technology, and industrialization influenced style,…
Athens County Fair
Things have changed since the first county fairs in Athens County. Until this century, after the Great Depression, most folks lived in rural areas. Not until the last quarter of the last century did we witness an exodus to the city - people left to find "good jobs." The pendulum swings again, the "good jobs" have…
Selling Pieces from the Past – Part One
In my bio, I have described myself as a historian and collector. . . my first collection, books. History and literature stretching from the middle ages to the present. How many? I never knew. I never counted. I knew there were books that I needed. Books that I needed to read again, paragraphs to ponder,…
Ephemera
Ephemera is one of those words that when spoken sounds like its meaning . . . a soft, wispy sound like whisper and rhymes with chimera. Ephemera are things that last only for a brief moment in time . . . like whispers and chimera, ephemera lack real substance but not necessarily importance in everyday life. You might even say that we…
Pieces of the Past – An Antique Notebook
Sometimes it happens during my travels that I find somethings that stirs not only curiosity but also my emotion. And sometimes, I doubt that I should be the keeper of the bit or scrap of paper, documents, letters, memos, receipts. If found in an archive, these bits of the past are classified as documents, if…
Mid Century Modern Furniture
At this point, at the very beginning of this post, I need to come clean. I was born in the fifties. I was a sixties child . . . prone to question at the very least, if not loudly reject the status quo, fashion, style and philosophy of anyone over thirty. And that was before I…