In my Etsy shop: Winter Whites

Things in my basement are NOT GOOD right now. A leaky pipe, a rotted subfloor and mold mean that my food storage/laundry room contents had to be completely removed and shoved into the rest of the (already full) basement. Not sure how long it will take to fix, or how much it's going to cost. Suffice it to say, things are not happy. I have no idea when I'll be able to do laundry again so I'll be toting my dirties over to friends' homes for the next few weeks. Dee-lightful!

One of the reasons my basement is already full is because that's where I store of all of my inventory for my Etsy shop. So in an effort to clean things out and make the basement a little less crowded, I've been on an Etsy listing spree. This week I've chosen to list a bunch of white things in a section called "Winter Whites". I may add more listings as I find more items in my stash to fit the theme, but this is what I have so far:

A trio of white milk glass handled sugar bowls. I have two of the bottom version. I love how they look like trophies!

https://www.etsy.com/listing/120727361/vintage-milk-glass-trophy-shaped-sugar

https://www.etsy.com/listing/120726871/pair-of-vintage-milk-glass-trophy-shaped

A gorgeous ironstone leaf-shaped bowl dating from the 1800s:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/120539904/antique-1800s-white-ironstone-china-leaf

A sweet little white bowl with a perfectly shabby patina:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/120538367/vintage-aged-white-cream-brown-patina

 An antique Homer Laughlin dish with markings that date it to February 1921:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/120537566/antique-vintage-homer-laughlin-hudson

Another antique ironstone bowl dating from the 1800s:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/120541583/antique-1800s-white-ironstone-bowl-dish

And a vintage Sterling China bowl with a gorgeous shabby patina:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/120542806/vintage-white-cream-shabby-chippy-patina

A beautiful carved Mother of Pearl necklace with a rosary-style chain. This would be so pretty on a bride! Love the glow from Mother of Pearl.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/120725277/vintage-antique-mother-of-pearl-rosary

 Two different sizes of new old stock vintage German pressed glass buttons:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/117480631/vintage-glass-buttons-white-and-gold

https://www.etsy.com/listing/117754018/vintage-glass-buttons-white-and-gold

 And a vintage aluminum Cuban cigar tube filled with vintage Mother of Pearl buttons:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/58803203/vintage-shell-buttons-in-a-vintage-cuban

I've brought up my inventory boxes from the basement and I'm hopeful that I'll be more likely to get it listed if it's staring me in the face, so to speak, rather than buried down in the cold basement. Wish me luck!

Vintage Christmas wrapping paper Scrap Packs

I've been collecting vintage Christmas wrapping paper for a few years now, and this year I finally did something with all of it!

I've put together several Scrap Packs that I think would be great for vintage-style Christmas crafting, whether it's card-making or scrapbooking or simply making your own cute gift tags.

 There are all kinds of patterns and prints. Jolly Santas, festive bells,

 dancing couples, snowy villages, glowing candles,

beautiful embossed foils, and more. Most of them are in traditional reds, greens, golds and silvers,

but there is one bundle with pinks and aquas

And one with greens and blues. Each Scrap Pack has 20 pieces of paper, ranging in size from 4" x 6" to 20" x 30" depending on the bundle. Some of the pieces are big enough to wrap a small gift, and some are best suited for cutting up and crafting.

In addition to the Scrap Packs, I have some full-size sheets of paper for sale as well. This grouping has really non-traditional colors of black, gold, orange and red.

This one is gold, green, aqua and purple.

I think this one might be my favorite, though--one sheet decorated with a snowy village, and one sheet decorated with darling little leaping deer!

These and more are all available right now in my Etsy shop!

Halloween platters 2011: Round two

I posted a while ago about the upcycled Halloween platters I made for my Etsy shop this year, but I didn't stop there! I made a few more and wanted to show them off because I love the silhouette images!

First is the Spooky Silhouette Family Gallery, all of them on vintage china platters:

Dracula

Frankenstein

Witch

Skeleton

I also found these two really neat orange dishes. They're not vintage, but they're the perfect color for Halloween!

Dracula on orange

Spooky crow on tombstone on orange

I also found one more of my favorite USA pottery oval shaped plates. I used these last year and I love them!

Spooky crow on tombstone on white

This pair of vintage white pottery urns got spookified with the addition of a pair of spindly-legged spiders.

Spidery white vintage urns

I didn't make these plates, but I love the black and white and I think they'd look nice in an arrangement with some of the silhouette platters.

Vintage Glastonbury Abbey plate

Vintage Italian villa plate

I can't resist vintage aluminum cookie cutters when I am out thrifting. Christmas designs seem to be the most common, but I've come across a few Halloween shapes so I glittered them and made Halloween tree ornaments out of them.

Glittery vintage Halloween cookie cutter ornaments

I've had so much fun crafting for Halloween this year! I've been so busy crafting, in fact, that I haven't decorated for Halloween yet. Eeek! Now that's scary. The boxes have been in the front room for a week, but I decided (once I'd dragged everything up from the basement and made a huge mess, naturally) that I really wanted to paint my china hutch, a project I've been meaning to do all summer long.

I got started on Monday and I have to admit that it isn't going as well as I'd like. Next time I decide to paint a piece of furniture with a brush and roller and latex paint, somebody slap me, mmmmmkay? You'd think I'd have learned my lesson, but apparently I'm a slow learner. Or an optimist. Or just really forgetful. It's spray paint from here on out, baby! Hopefully I'll have a finished project to show you soon. Hopefully, because I need to get the decorating DONE and the disaster that is my front room back in order because it's giving me the itchies. Time to man my sanding block!

Halloween platters 2011

I mentioned in Monday's Junk Finds post that I did something fun and Halloweeny with the Fire King peach lustre bowl that I bought at the thrift store.

Fire King peach lustre spider bowl

And here it is! I knew when I saw it that the orange color would be perfect for Halloween crafting. I spookified it with a big black spider. Although I'm always on the lookout for Fire King dishes, I've never collected peach lustre because it didn't fit in with my color scheme. Now I see how perfect it is for Halloween decorating, so I might just give it a second look!

Trick or Treat antique plate

The mark on this amazing ironstone plate gives it a manufacture date from sometime between 1867 and 1878! It has some really great crazing and staining that definitely adds to the distressed, spooky look.

Yellow moon with bats platter

When I found this vintage yellow platter, I realized it looked just like a big golden full moon, so of course I had to add some bats flying across. I love how it turned out!

Happy Halloween large oval Coronet platter

I think this is my favorite of this year's Halloween plates. This gorgeous platter is from the Coronet line by Homer Laughlin, which was produced in the mid-1930s. The Coronet line had all of the same forms, but there were dozens and dozens of different versions based on the way the design was painted. This platter is unpainted, and it was the absolute perfect size for the Happy Halloween image! It's huge and heavy and a great statement piece. I absolutely love it.

Orange crow or raven platter

This platter is not necessarily vintage, but the terra cotta orange color made it perfect for Halloween, and the big crow was just the right size for it! I added a red jewel for his eye, just for fun.

These three plates are from my 2010 collection and are still available:

Spider silhouette plate

Spooky spider plate

Pair of spiders square plate

All of these are available right now in my Etsy shop!

The weather's beautiful, Wish you were here

A few days ago, I posted what are undoubtedly the strangest items yet to find their way to my Etsy shop:

Vintage dead duck postcards

Vintage dead deer postcards

You know, normally postcards feature glossy photos of attractive local sights, inviting resorts, or beautiful views. Rarely do you find postcards featuring Dead Animals and the People Who Killed Them. It might make sense if I'd found these in some hunting lodge in Minnesota, but they came from a drugstore in a small Midwestern town. Back in 2005, I bought a vintage wooden card display from a drugstore in Missouri, and its contents included boxes of vintage wrapping paper, greeting cards, and these bizarre postcards. I've held onto them for 6 years now and finally decided it was time to let them go to someone who can appreciate their...um...uniqueness.

So, if you're in the market for some Dead Animal postcards, you know where to find them. While you're there, check out the other new stuff I've listed lately! There's some cool vintage wrapping paper that also came with that card display, but is slightly different in that it features no slain furry woodland creatures. If you like that kind of boring thing.

Weekend junk finds and New stuff in my shop

This weekend's junk finds serve as another reminder that good, old junk can still be found in the suburbs! Sometimes I get so hung up on the old houses=old junk theory that I bypass my local sales, thinking they'll just be full of baby clothes and old VHS tapes (because frequently, they are!).

This jewelry was found at a sale within walking distance of my house! The sale didn't look like much from the street, but when I got up close I found a card table absolutely covered in little bags of jewelry that had belonged to the seller's aunt, a woman who ran a folk dance troupe somehow connected with the UN. I was able to find goodies to replenish my Box of Happy:

Which was running low in a few colors. I'll be keeping the bright red beaded necklace, and I'll have to perform some repair work on the pretty blue moonglow Lucite necklace at the bottom of the photo.

That morning I found another interesting sale not far from my house. When we got there, I thought I heard the sellers mention that everything on the driveway was FREE--and there was a ton of stuff! I picked out a few things--a vintage Christmas corsage, a few tiny pieces of vintage pottery--and approached the seller to pay, only to be told again that it was all FREE. When I asked why, she said that the previous day there had been a terrific thunderstorm while they'd been running the sale. They'd had to run for cover to the garage, leaving all of the merchandise out in the driveway to be rained upon, and the lightening was so severe that they were afraid to go out and get it all. Thus, much of the stuff got wet and they felt like they couldn't charge any money for it.

There were a few boxes of damp books, but most of the stuff displayed on the tables was perfectly fine! There were more things I would like to have taken (a few vintage items, a few useful items) but it honestly made me so uncomfortable to take it without paying that I just couldn't do it! It was weird. (I did take the corsage and the pottery--I think my total for those items would have been about $1 so I didn't feel too bad, and come on--who could leave behind a vintage Christmas corsage?)

I've been working hard to refill my sad, neglected Etsy shop with some fun items--go check it out! Here's a sampling of what you'll find: