Oodles and oodles

Peek inside a drawer

Welcome to Show and Tell Sunday, hosted by Cerri and Analise! We're looking at vintage linens this week. There aren't too many drawers in my house I'd want anybody to open, but we can look in this one. This is where I keep the guest towels. Not that I use guest towels, but that doesn't prevent me from collecting them.



I love linens. I think they were about the first thing I started to collect. I love 'em all - sheets, pillowcases, doilies, dresser scarves, kitchen towels, tablecloths.  We're not looking in any of those drawers today.  Enough said.



I never pass up a towel with the initial of our last name.



Or real linen.



Or fancy ones with flowers and lace.



Or one I made with an old embroidery transfer I found. A guest towel is a good project, just big enough to look like something but not so big you can't get it done in an evening.



Time to put them away and go look at your pretty things!

Garden party

Plucked some pretty hats at a sale Saturday morning. My only dilemma is which to wear Sunday to torture the kids.



The straw? A little too casual, I think.



The velvet sweet peas? Maybe.



This frothy pink confection of flowers and netting and sequins? Mmmm, yes. I think we have a winner.

Our household's contribution to world peace

These guys (Patch, above, and Carson, below) are not the best of buddies, but they do share a common goal of ruining the couch. Besides, I couldn't stand calling up my blog and seeing those flower pictures I posted yesterday. Too bright! Need sunglasses!

This is what happens when you start reading blogs

I had been immune to the allure of plastic flowers ...



but then I started seeing them on people's blogs ...



and then these caught my eye today ...



and you know, I kind of like them.



But I don't think I have room for one more collection. So to Etsy they go. Soon as I wash them. Maybe by tomorrow.

A stress-free swap

If only every week could be like last week. On top of thrift store happiness and auction bliss, I got a surprise in the mailbox: a package from Pasha! She sent lots of this wonderful gingham eyelet ...

gorgeous cotton lace that she dyed herself ...

fun little craft supplies like these (those aren't matches; they're a tiny sewing kit!) ...

itty-bitty babies ...

a pair of crocheted teacups ... I could go on and on. You know the phrase, "Be careful of what you wish for?" Apparently Pasha didn't, because when she admired my collection of cheesy 1950s toys from Hong Kong, I immediately sensed opportunity and put all of them in a box to Arizona. And she sent me this in return! It was kind of a swap, without the stress.

Swaps make me nervous. Sometimes I look at what people send each other in swaps, and I think, geez, I didn't get my mom that much for Christmas last year. On the other hand, I know of an experience in which swap partner A spent weeks creating something lovely and swap partner B apparently spent a few bucks at the dollar store ... nobody can really blog about swaps gone wrong, because nobody wants to be unkind, and you have to assume that people go into these with the best of intentions.

So that's probably why I signed up for Sarah's apron swap, because it was so nice and straightforward: a vintage apron trade. And the deadline is Wednesday, and I'm going right now to get my apron for my swap partner Pam. And speaking of Sarah, she is celebrating her birthday by giving away vintage tablecloths - shouldn't we be giving them to her?

A new use for vintage hats

My friend Kerri had the best idea when I stopped at her house after the auction Saturday. "You know what you should do tomorrow?" she asked, looking at the vintage hats I'd bought. "You should wear one to church."

We fell silent, taking in the sheer brilliance of what she had just suggested. And then we laughed. It was an evil kind of laugh, reserved for those rare moments when the mothers of teenagers realize that for once, just once, maybe they can get the better of their children rather than the other way around.



The timing could not have been better, because my daughter's confirmation was Sunday, and so of course we wanted to dress up a bit. We were just about to head out the door when I grabbed the white flower-covered pillbox number and carefully arranged it on my head.



My son was the first to see it. "No." he said. "No, no. No." It was as if his vocabulary had suddenly been reduced to one word. My daughter came out to the kitchen and shrieked. "Take it off!" she cried. Let me say that the hardest part of this whole thing was keeping a straight face and pretending not to understand what they were objecting to. My husband, who had been clued in, played along. "It's traditional for mothers to wear hats when their daughter is being confirmed," I said. (That's not true, but I was going to be confessing my sins in like 15 minutes, so I figured I was safe.) "Could you wear one that doesn't look like you stuck your head in a wedding cake?" she asked.



That made me proud. I mean, take another look at that hat. I think that was a pretty good analogy.



We got in the car. I drove. The kids pleaded. They begged. They threatened. They were nearly hysterical - not a ha- ha funny kind of hysteria but an oh- my- god- if- anyone- sees- us- we're- finished kind of hysteria. I don't remember having this much fun on Mother's Day in a long time.



I must have been concentrating on my driving instead of them because as we approached the stop sign, my son deftly reached forward, flipped the hat off my head and chucked it into the rear compartment. My daughter cheered. A rare showing of sibling unity, and another reason to be happy on Mother's Day.

Flowers for my mom

This is my favorite photograph of my mom, but my favorite image of her is one I carry with me everywhere.

I was 11 or 12 when I spent the night in the hospital to get my tonsils out. I could not wait to get home the next morning. The nurse had no more than carried away my breakfast of ice cream than my mom appeared in the doorway, ready to get me out of there.

She was wearing a sleeveless shirtwaist dress, with a sage green skirt and a sage-and-white polka dotted top. It was a beautiful nubby cotton, and like all of the clothes my mom made, sewn to perfection. In her hand she carried an enormous bouquet of lilies of the valley. As a child, you take your mother for granted. But I think in that moment I realized how lucky I was: that I had a mom who would not make me wait a moment longer than I needed to go home, that she would look beautiful for the occasion, that she would go to the trouble to pick me a bouquet of flowers.

So these flowers are for you, Mom. With thanks and love.

Pretend for a second it's December

I'm back from the first auction of the season. If every auction this summer is this good, I will be a happy girl. Bankrupt, yet somehow still happy. I find it a little glaring to look at Christmas treasures out of season, but you gotta see this. And I'm saving the best for last.



My bottle brush tree collection grew exponentially. These are nice, big, fat ones, almost a foot tall. I love the chenille roping and the tiny ornaments on this one. The Santa is a 1940s-1950s candy container. I have a couple of them, but this is the first one I've gotten that still had his skis intact.



I didn't find these in the box until I came home. They're glass teardrops, wrapped with little bits of curly wire and wired tinsel and little flowers in the top.



Aren't they amazing? So in between my pictures and my breathless descriptions, I'll tell you about the auction. I was right on two fronts: one, the place did look like a natural disaster had recently occurred there (or even occurred there, say, 50 years ago, and people just walked away and never came back). And yet, it was awesome, too.



Did you ever see pictures of Christmas trees with fences built around the bottom? This is a box full of fence pieces. I had a few pieces already, but now I think I can fence in our entire five acres. Oh, so back to the auction. The place was a mess, and the auctioneer hadn't done much to organize, but if you were willing to poke and crawl around, there was wonderful stuff to be found.



An old cardboard and glass glitter treetop. I might faint. Anyhow, it's not like this stuff was all laid out on trays and arranged neatly in boxes. There was a lot of hunting involved. It was kind of thrilling. Except for this one box that I opened ...



and there was something small and furry and seemingly inanimate yet somehow ... I don't know, organic. So I slapped the lid right back on it, not really caring to investigate further, but there on the box were the words "Anna's curls." They were the (quite voluminous and curly) locks that a girl had had cut, and probably her mother had saved. Very sweet. A little creepy, but sweet. I didn't buy them. OK, so here's the best part.



LOTS of ornaments. I haven't unpacked and counted them yet, but these go several layers deep.



These are old hand-painted ornaments from Poland.



These aren't the greatest ornament photos, but I think I'm too excited to focus. Got some other fun stuff, too, including OLD wallpaper and hats. And after I bought the second lot of wallpaper, this guy gave me his card and said he's got a ton of old wallpaper that he didn't want to throw away but didn't know what to do with. Would I be interested in looking at it? Aack! I'm going to his warehouse (warehouse! double aack!) week after next. I think I have to go lie down now.

On a whim

The teeny-tiny thrift store in my tiny little town is not one I visit regularly. It's a church-run, all-volunteer operation, and stopping in is more the result of acting on a whim than setting out on a mission. Finding a doll-sized set of milk glass tea cups and saucers there Friday afternoon was a happy surprise.


And then I found this covered dish. You can tell I'm in love with something when I take more pictures of it than I do of my dog.



The basket weave is cute enough, but that rose handle? And not a chip or crack to be seen. It's marked Made in Japan in gold on the bottom with a kind of banner and crown mark. Anybody know if it's a particular kind of pottery? (Other than adorable?)



I'm heading to my first auction of the season tomorrow. It sounds awesome - one family living in the same house since the 1800s! As my auction pal Laurel has wisely observed, this particular auctioneer makes all of his sales sound awesome. Most of his sales look as if a natural disaster occurred recently. Laurel says his motto should be "Don't take it to the dump! We'll have an auction!"



Can't help myself. The ad sounds too tempting. Good or bad, I'm sure it will be something to blog about.

Cheatin'

Completely cheating on a couple of fronts this AM. I took so many Etsy pictures yesterday (and have so many more to take today) that I swiped one of them for the blog instead of taking a fresh one. I got my stuff listed at a breakneck speed yesterday: like six items in six hours! By nightfall I had a bunch of sympathetic/empathetic/pretty funny comments on yesterday's complaint - and two orders! Thankyouthankyouthankyou. It's good to know that other people (I'm not mentioning names) have tubs of stuff (that may or may not be a direct quote) waiting to be listed.

When I wasn't experiencing the thrill of watching photos upload yesterday, I painted some gold frames that I bought for 50 cents at an estate sale a few weeks ago. Here's a before and after shot. That streaky white Shabby Chic style is meant for people like me, who really hate the thought of a second coat of paint. There was a time when I would paint in the basement or the garage so if I made a mess it wouldn't matter. Now I just put some wax paper on the kitchen counter and hope for the best. More cheating. (The paint streaks are on the wax paper, not the counter. I think.)

OK, are you ready for the biggest cheat of all?

I stole this picture from someone else's Web site! Yes, I did! Didn't ask permission or nothin'. Obviously I don't have a big future in photo-swiping since I can't seem to get this one the size it should be. Anyway, you can see the original here and find out how much my pal Linda paid for this cute little tea set. If you think I find stuff cheap, wait 'til you see what she   gets. (And how she gets it.)