Oodles and oodles

Party like it's 1926!

 

The Dennison Manufacturing Co. made many wonderful products, but none of them could top its series of Bogie Books. They were produced yearly from 1909 through 1934, and they are chock-a-block full of great, great Halloween stuff. Need some ideas for your party this weekend? Take a look at the Bogie Book from 1926.

 

First, get busy making some life-size pumpkin figures, a pumpkin banner, a crepe-paper curtain and various pumpkin heads, and decorate the living room.
 
 

Then, decorate your entrance.

 

Create some chandeliers using ordinary household objects, such as an upside-down umbrella.

 

Don't forget to decorate the table!

For our costumes, we're going to jump ahead a few decades.

 

This 1952 book of patterns and instructions for costumes made from crepe paper was a gift from the delightful Jewels of Just Tickety-Boo.

 

This photo lacks detail, but I think you can get the sense of the many kinds of Gay Dancing Flowers that can easily be made from crepe paper.

 

Perhaps you'd like a more sophisticated look. Or maybe you just think it would be fun to ruffle and fringe 10,000 yards of crepe paper to reproduce an 1880s gown.

 

Crepe paper also makes an excellent tutu and is versatile enough to use for all of the holidays, such as the 4th of July.

 
  
If it's challenge you seek - or you just want to dress up like a rooster - make a crepe paper bird costume. To make a rooster head, made a foundation out of double layer of crepe paper, then cut rows of hundreds of feathers, layer them and sew them on the foundation, row after row. I'll quote from the book: "If a complete costume is needed, follow the instructions for the robin." I'll warn you, though: The robin looks difficult. It requires making large wings and a tail over a wire frame before you even start with the hundreds of feathers, row after row.
 
Maybe we should return to a simpler time.

 

These I could handle. Simple favor cups.

Let's consult the last page of the book for more information:

"Dennison goods may be purchased from stationers, department stores and from many drug stores ...

"Cardboard cut-outs cost 10 cents for a package of six or more for the very small sizes up to 12 cents each for the very large ones ...

"Hallowe'en invitations in witch, pumpkin or gnome designs, each with an envelope, cost from 5 cents to 10 cents each ..."

"Decorated table covers that are 36 inches square and in a witch design cost 20 cents each ..."

Is that screaming and wailing I hear? I suppose it's only appropriate, being the Halloween season and all.
 
 
 
 

Rickrack and such

 

Last week disappeared in a combination of a couple extra days at work, a parents' weekend visit to my son's college and a lot of shopping. Alas, it was the kind of shopping required when we're out of pet supplies, over-the-counter medicines, food, cleaning products - not the fun kind of shopping. Still, I managed to fit in a couple of strategic side trips. The fabric in the background is a $2 bedspead from a church thrift store. The rickrack came from an estate sale.

 

I'm not usually a fan of bias tape, but the old prints in the foreground say cute school clothes to me. The ones in the back rows are Christmas prints from the early 1980s. No, I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of bias tape; the date is printed on the package.

 

More rickrack.

 

I'll buy any old postcard with a cute snowman. This came from an antique shop I've been meaning to visit forever.

 

This towel came from the same shop. I did get one project finished this weekend, which was so easy it almost doesn't qualify as a project. Here's the before:

 
 
Footstool from an estate sale a couple of weeks ago. It could double as a little side table - you know, the kind you see in magazines, set with a silver tray and tea set and some pretty cookies and linen napkins, like that's going to happen around here.

 
 
Here it is, scrubbed up and with new upholstery. I considered painting it, but I'll live with it like this for a while and see how I feel.

I'll close by saying the Steelers-Vikings game Sunday afternoon was one of the best football games I've seen in a long time, and I'm counting last year's Super Bowl, which, we all remember, was won by the Pittsburgh Steelers, making them the first team in NFL history to win six Super Bowls. Not that I'm obsessed or anything.  
 

 
 
 
  

Black and orange all over

 

Want to peek at some Halloween decorations? If you put old masks on a windowsill, they kind of glow at sunset and look spooky. Good fun for the easily amused.

 

Most of the honeycomb pumpkins and the coven of Gurley witch candles were corralled on the hutch. More often than not, the honeycomb pumpkins I find lack stems. This year I scanned some of the stems onto cardstock, cut them out and taped them on. It's a quick fix, and you really can't tell the difference. I'm indebted to LiLi for her advice on repairing the paper mache pumpkin, which needed a few patches. She suggested using a bridge of masking tape behind the area to be repaired to support the patch, and that worked great. Thanks, LiLi!

 

A cake stand with noisemakers, etc. The tin noisemaker on the right isn't really a Halloween one, but it's orange, which is close enough for me.

 

Skeleton die cut in a frame - this isn't where it's displayed, but it was the best place to take the picture.

 
 
I rearranged the Hoosier a little bit so my favorite decoration could get the spotlight it deserves. It's a slice of a crepe paper tablecloth, a gift from the delightful Beth. I was so thrilled to get it that I put it in a extra-safe place, and of course I couldn't find it last Halloween. This is the first year it's seen the light of day here, and I'm in love with it all over again. Thanks, Beth!
 
  
 
 

Buttons, a life lesson and brunch

 

So there weren't any auctions or estate sales that looked like they were worth the time and effort to get to this weekend.

But by late morning Saturday, I was getting hungry for some junk, and so I went to the little flea market store (note to Sue, who lives nearby: the place with all the Happy Meal toys). And this is most of what I brought home.

 

Here's what the buttons looked like when I found them: lovingly sorted and stapled into little plastic bags by the older lady who runs the store with her husband. I used to get so annoyed when I'd see them at a yard sale. I figured they had already bought anything I'd want.

 
 
Because I'd have certainly snatched these away from them if I'd had a chance. But then it dawned on me: They weren't rivals. They were helpers. All I had to do was go to their shop occasionally and just buy from them. So what if they got to a sale before me? Maybe I'd have to pay a quarter for something instead of a dime. It really seemed kind of silly to care.

 
 
And I like their curious little store, and the two of them. They're awfully sweet. Their grown-up granddaughter visited with her new puppy while I was there Saturday, and the good karma of place was just off the scale, with the grandparents fussing over the puppy while I was digging in the button bin.

 
 
These yellow buttons came in two sizes. Very Mary Engelbreit, don't you think? I also got some nice old paper parasols ("Don't you just love these?" the lady asked when I was checking out) and a bunch of great old embroidery scissors.

 
 
You'd think in all the boxes of sewing notions I've toted home over the years that I'd have a hundred pairs of scissors. Nope. One pair of pinking shears and a couple of pairs of clunky kid-sized scissors. These are slim and elegant and lovely.

 

Of course there was a pair of stork scissors.



 On Sunday we went to the Aurora Inn and enjoyed brunch with the initially resistant but ultimately delightful Miss Oodles and oodles, as well as ...

 
 
tidy windowboxes full of geraniums ...

 

a limestone ruin that captured a view of Cayuga Lake and migrating geese ...

 
 
and miles of rosebush hedges. It was a very good weekend.
 

 

 
 

Fall finery

 

It's difficult, but I usually manage to read Magpie Ethel and keep my jealous nature in check. When I saw the fall corsage Laurie found, though, I really, really wanted one. Even though Christmas ones turn up pretty regularly, I've never seen a fall one, so I made one.

 

That was fun, so I made a Halloween one.

 

Then I made a ghostly kitty one. I put a few in Etsy last weekend but they're gone, so I'm making more. The best thing about making corsages is that you need everything.

 

Christmas ornaments, tinsel, ribbon, cupcake picks, millinery flowers, pipe cleaners. Everything. So much I was forced to abandon my dining room work table and carve out a space to work in the attic. (Hence the kind of odd lighting. It's a third floor room lit by dormers, and quite cozy, but not exactly flooded with daylight.)

 
  
Old corsages for inspiration.

 

Little bits for the season ahead.

 

This guy is a work in progress. I found a great wool felt hat with these black and white flowers Thursday, along with an industrial-size spool of black grosgrain ribbon, so they're getting put to use right away.

 

So I know what I'll be doing this weekend - along with watching football, making good meals with all of the lovely fall vegetables I got at the last - :( - farmers' market of the season, and maybe a little leaf-peeping on Sunday. Can't wait.
 
 
 
 
 

Halloween Hoosier, and lots of miscellany

 

Natural light has been in such short supply lately that I was forced to do something I've never done: actually read the manual that came with my camera. Gosh, there's all sorts of interesting stuff in there. I have a lot to learn, but in the meantime, here's the Hoosier dressed up for Halloween.

 

I'm keeping it kind of low-key this year. Pretty much all I did was put anything red away and bring out kitchen-y things that were orange. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I found another Jadite mixing bowl. I intentionally did not buy it at an estate sale a couple of weeks ago, but it was still there when I went back later in the day for the half-price sale. It seemed pretty obvious that it was waiting to come home with me.

 
 
The sugar bowl and creamer are Homer Laughlin. I put away the floral Swanky Swigs and brought out the black star ones for Halloween.

 

The orange things you can see on the shelf edges are Halloween napkins. They're heavily textured so the pictures are a little weird, but the graphics are so great.

 
 
 

The last one is the classic kitties-at-a-bonfire image. They're eating hot dogs and corn on the cob.

Here are some random things that did not merit an individual blog post and also lacked photos:

Recommended book: Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow. If you can imagine the movie Forrest Gump combined with an episode of Hoarding and turned into a novel, you'll get the idea. The book is a fictionalized version of the life of the reclusive Collyer Brothers. I read the book front to back in less than a day.

Astonished by: The demise of Gourmet magazine.
 
Good food: Arugula dressed with sauteed red onions, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Even better: same salad, with feta cheese and roasted beets.

My latest grievance**: Anyone over the age of 16 who wears pajama pants in public. You can be old enough to drive, or young enough to wear pajama pants in public, but there's no overlap.

** My Latest Grievance is the name of a novel by Eleanor Lipman and is well worth reading, as is everything she writes.
 
  
 
 

 

Pumpkins and such

The Halloween decorations started to creep out of hiding over the weekend. These shelves are devoted to mostly pumpkins.

 

Pumpkins, party hats, a noisemaker and one of my favorite vintage decorations, a little cardboard candy holder.

 
 
Here's a better picture of it, in a different location. I got a few of these in a box at an auction maybe five years ago, and I've never seen anything like them since. It's hard not to love a happy kitty in overalls with a pumpkin cart.

 

Still fussing with these shelves. In the course of decorating, I realized I had an overabundance of honeycomb pumpkins. I didn't think that was possible, but I have several that are so big, I have nowhere to put them.

 

So I put them in Etsy. These truly are Great Pumpkins, like a foot and a half across.

 

I spent more of my weekend than I'm willing to admit making Halloween corsages. They are pretty addictive, especially because they require me to get out Every Single Thing I Can Think Of. Isn't that what three-day weekends are for? I'll show you more tomorrow.
 
 
 


 

A random post with greeting cards

 

I've always avoided those church rummage sales that let you buy a bag's worth of merchandise for a dollar because I really don't need to be encouraged to haul more stuff home. I happened to be driving right by a church sale last Saturday, and it seemed silly not to stop, and once I found a Gurley turkey candle (middle) and these odd hard-plastic turkeys, I had a bag, and my dollar's worth, and so everything else was pretty much free, if you get what I mean.

 

Those church ladies are geniuses, because they managed to talk me into these candle rings and electric candles. I limited myself to candles with an embossed holly-leaf design, or they'd have loaded me up with even more. I also found some pretty dotted-swiss fabric, which is waiting to go in the washer, and some button blanks to cover, and I think some other things I'm too embarrassed to remember.

 

This morning I went to an antique store that has a barn sale every month or so, and I usually find something I like. I thought this mirror was pretty great, and my daughter actually screamed when she saw it. It'll be on Etsy no later than tomorrow.

 
 
I also found a pair of Gurley pilgrim candles at a thrift-store price, and a stack of greeting cards, my favorite of which is this excellent turkey advertising ephemera. I don't really know why a shoe store would use a turkey for its advertising, but there it is.
 
 

If the turkey card weren't my favorite, the bird card would be, because of the little curtains.

 

Or this one, because it has tiny velvet flowers.

 

Or this one, because it not only has a horseshoe and a dog, it has a dog with a ribbon in its fur and a tiny calendar for 1936.

 

Or these birthday cards, which have little birthday button pins.

 

Earlier this week I found the birthday bluebird pin (a Sunday School gift, I'm guessing) in amongst some sewing buttons, and so now I have an official collection of birthday pins.

 

And this card completely stole my heart.

 
 
For obvious reasons.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Latest fashions

 

The latest patterns I've found, and the latest skirt fashions, circa 1955.

 

No date on these, but check out those great pockets.

 
 
Dresses for the well-corseted woman. I wouldn't have guessed the one on the left is from 1962, but it is.

 

My favorite find in the box of patterns was this home catalog - it's like a streamlined, magazine-size version of the big pattern books. My mom remembers getting these quarterly; this one is from Summer 1968.

 

It's packed with some of the cutest dresses ever.

 
 
It's hard to pick a favorite. Everything looks good with short white gloves and patterned tights.

 
 
But maybe this one. Especially the flowered version with the ruffles.
 
On the subject of the 1960s, a discussion question: Is anyone else finding this season of "Mad Men" a little lacking? Too much Betty, not enough Don? Too much home life, not enough office? Too much Peter, not nearly enough Joan? And Peggy - with Duck? Every week I wait for a great episode, but this season, I'm still waiting.
  
 


 

Crazy about corsages

 

The box of Christmas stuff from Saturday's sale yielded a few boxes of Christmas ornaments (nice, not extraordinary) and these three picks.

 

What I really liked in that box were a bunch of corsages.

 

Loving the glass beads wired into the pine cones on the left.

 

I wish the focus was better on this one - a shiny holly leaf, ivory velvet leaves, pink forget-me-nots and a little ornament. That's a lot to love.



 I can't tell if this angel has candlesticks in each hand, or drumsticks. Either way, she kind of looks like an angel gone wild.