Fall day trip

Last weekend, it was so warm that we decided to get in a small road trip to Wisconsin. It's one of our favorite things to do, and this year with buying the house and settling in and everything that comes with that we've had very little opportunities to do it. So with temperatures 20 degrees warmer than earlier that week, we hit the road in style.

Outfit details

dress: made by me

1940s alligator shoes: Randolph Street Market

cardigan: knit by a friend

belt: Gidjit on Etsy

scarf: somewhere or other

locket bracelet: handmade by Made with Love SV on Etsy

modern wool coat: bought in Ireland on the high street

We spent the day in and around Kenosha, and had lunch at a cute little café, the Secret Garden Café and Gallery. We found it thanks to sitting in a parking lot by the lake and looking for Yelp reviews nearby... ah, the wonders of technology.

I had tasty tomato basil soup and a grilled cheese sandwich which looked like a heart.

They had something called a Little Free Library in the entrance way. I love projects that promote literacy. You can even get plans from them to build your own!

Along with a used bookstore stop, where I found a 1960s copy of the Bishop Method of Clothing Construction, we went to an antique mall and picked up an ornate mirror and a few small antique prints for our bedroom. I'll have to photograph them when we eventually paint and decorate the bedroom and hang them all up, but the room is quite lackluster still.

Did I mention what was outside the antique mall? Actually this pig had a couple of friends with him as well (not including Mel of course).

We also took the opportunity to revel a bit in the amazing autumn colors in a park. This is one of my favorite pair of shoes lately, 40s alligator pumps.

The bench just matched the leaves so perfectly.

We saw a jeweler in town that had amazing relics in the window from its long history.

I loved these vintage ring boxes in particular. I definitely need one like in the middle or on the right!

I couldn't miss the chance to pose on the stairs of this amazing side entrance to a church, it looked right out of Europe to me.

All in all it was a lovely way to spend one of the last hurrahs of fall!

I hope you've been finding ways to enjoy it, too!

Cabin getaway & recent finds

Thanks for all the replies and commiseration on my vintage hair funk post! It certainly sounds like it's going around. Spring fever, perhaps. What I have now is sort of grown out of the middy-like haircut I got in November, but it's definitely due for something. I still haven't decided on what I'm going to go for, but it will probably be just a shorter version of what I have (or what's grown out, rather). My best hair wishes to those of you who were also expressing frustration in your own hair conundrums!

♥ ♥

'Tis the season! Road trip season, that is. Mel and I love to take little road trips to Wisconsin, and spring usually starts road trip season (although in the case of last year, we got there even earlier in the year).

We spent the weekend in a cabin in southwestern Wisconsin with a small group of friends. Other than the overcast, chilly and drizzly weather, it was a fabulous weekend. Lots of fires in the wood-burning stove, food and drinks, games, walks in the woods, and I'm not sure I ever stopped laughing the entire time.

Here was the view from down the road of our cabin. Isn't it picturesque?  (That's our friends' dog Joey, who accompanied us on the trip.)

We spent awhile trying to identify the games hung up on the wall. Investigation led me to discover they are carrom and crokinole game boards, two games none of us had ever heard of.

I loved this bookcase in the cabin. If I had a cabin myself to decorate, I'd want pieces like this, I think...

There were cupcakes for our friend's birthday...

Which then turned into this.

A neat old shed...

Hunting for walking sticks, one slightly more Gandalf-esque than the other...

A great old tractor with over 4,000 miles on it...

We all took a turns. Pretending, that is.

Our friend's Jolene tea towel, I love this thing.

I got to do a good amount of knitting on the road and at the cabin (though the photo below is once we were at home, on our new IKEA shag rug for the den). These are the two sleeves for the pullover I started the last day in February, So Neat and Sweet from A Stitch in Time vol. 2. I made great progress on it until we moved, and then didn't pick up my knitting needles for over a month! Finally, I'm knitting again. I'd love to get this done quickly so I can start one of the thousand short-sleeved sweaters I have swimming in my head. (And hopefully sewing again will follow soon, too.)

It was a great weekend.

On our way home, Mel and I stopped at an antique mall outside of Madison to do a little hunting. I found a lovely scarf and two very inexpensive Bakelite spacer bangles that were tucked in amongst some boring-looking costume jewelry. Yay for the sniff test, taught to me awhile back by a local purveyor of vintage goods. (Unsure of the best on-the-go way to identify Bakelite? Check out Brittany's recent post on Va-Voom Vintage.)

I was happy with those little finds, and then we found The Lamp. You all know how we decided to go with vintage Southwestern as the overall theme in our den. Of course I've been daydreaming about all the rooms in our house, but particularly this one as it's already proven to be the room we spend the most time in. (The fact that our living room only recently got a sofa, still doesn't have the furniture arranged probably and is currently home to all the boxes of our patio furniture probably has something to do with that.)

In my head, I made up a lamp that I thought would be perfect in the room. It was white ceramic, with some kind of nubbly texture to it in some places, with colors that evoked the Southwest, and a fiberglass lampshade. I mean really, dear readers, I made this up in my head out of thin air.

And then we found this.

It took us about .05 seconds to decide it was ours.

I mean, c'mon! White ceramic! Textured sections in shades of brown, coral, and sky blue! A two-tiered fiberglass shade spattered with brown, white and turquoise!

And then when we saw this coral-colored working Westinghouse clock radio in the same booth, and we knew the room didn't have a clock anyway, well... the rest is clearly history.

And while this won't necessarily be the final arrangement on this particular end table (what you can't see is the ugly modern telephone base behind the clock radio), it's getting there.

A trio destined to be together, don't you think? Sofa, lamp, clock radio.

While we were leaning in that direction already, the lamp and clock radio pretty much cemented that a light turquoise or sky blue must be the wall color. Incidentally, that was the overall favorite amongst readers who chimed in.

Huzzah for when vintage decorating starts to come together!

Saturday's errand outfit

This was the last weekend before the wedding, and it was full of errands and unexpectedly getting a dead car battery replaced. One of the errands took us to Wisconsin, where we stopped for lunch at the new Mars Cheese Castle. So all I have time for this week is just a quick outfit post!

I'm wearing a sundress I purchased at VLV this spring, a beige beaded cardigan (because it was actually quite chilly) from Etsy, carrying a wicker basket purse with lucite handles from Etsy, and wearing a pair of shoes that I just purchased from Lauren at Wearing History! They are cream-colored wedges from the 1940s. Aren't they great? I can't wait to wear them in autumn with jeans, a casual sweater and white blouse for a vintage campus look.

The next several days will include last minute projects, cleaning, preparations and trying to decide how the heck to style my bangs for the wedding...you know, the important stuff. ;)

Have a great week, everyone!

Memorial Day camping trip

How is it already almost the weekend? I've been confused about the day of the week all week, because of the holiday on Monday. I finally had some time to pull together photos from our camping trip to Wisconsin last weekend.

We woke up bright and early Saturday morning for the drive up to Wisconsin. And by bright and early, I do mean bright and early. We were on the road by 6 a.m. I never used to think I would ever become a morning person, but in the last year or two we've found ourselves getting up much earlier than we ever used to. There really is something awesome about being done with your road trip and setting up your campsite by 8:30 a.m.! We were already out on a hike by about 10 o'clock.

You'll see in that photo a reoccurring theme in all these pictures, which is my braids doing goofy things. I tried to come up with a relatively easy hairstyle for camping, but because of the way I pulled my bangs back, that hair was significantly shorter than the rest and spent most of the weekend sticking  awkwardly out of my braids. Oh well!

The hike was on a leisurely trail that we really like that goes through forested areas and meadows. This is one of my favorite spots, and interesting little clearing with a bench.

There were lovely wildflowers blooming...

And it was so green!

Now we're the kind of people who almost never let their dog off leash, and certainly not somewhere where you aren't supposed to. But in one area of the trail, with no one around, we felt safe in letting Pia off leash for a game of fetch for a couple of minutes.

Yes, she's actually airborne!

Back on the campsite she was pooped out...

On Sunday we were waiting for our friends to arrive and had to endure a few hours of rain under our rain shelter. Can you see it dripping down the sides?

It wasn't that bad though. I knit and Mel read from The Princess Bride aloud. (We're trying to finish the book before the wedding—it's one of my all-time favorite movies.) We even set their tent up ahead of time for them in case it continued to rain the rest of the day. Fortunately it only lasted for a few hours, and it was done by the time they arrived. Though we had to dry out a few things...

And boy, was I was really glad to have my wellies with me on this trip. I wore them almost the whole time. This was my "vintage camping chic" look, ha ha!

We met our friends in town for lunch that afternoon when they arrived, but once we all got back on the campsite a toast was in order because it was Mel's birthday!

It was shortly after the rain stopped that I started to be annoyed that the sides of the rain shelter made you have to duck under it each time you wanted to get to the picnic table. However every good knitter is armed with a needle and spare yarn, so I whipped up a quick fix.

I simply threaded a strand of yarn through the holes in the mesh and tied the sides up higher. Perfect!

Actually I did a lot of knitting that weekend...

We all had a late dinner by the light of a mantle lantern. We had a variety of things including hot dogs, veggie burgers, potato salad and fresh grilled asparagus.

And last but not least, here's Mel starting a camp fire. Of course there were s'mores later that night over the fire! With yummy Cadbury Dairy Milk that Emma brought back home from Wales for the chocolate, which of course is far superior to our American standard of using a Hershey bar.

Overall it was a great camping trip, and we're really glad to have another one planned at the beginning of July!