Last weekend's vintage finds

Hello everyone! I'm glad you enjoyed my tutorial on how to make a feedsack hair bow. It's such a quick and easy project, you better let me know if you make one!

Last Sunday was our one year wedding anniversary. Our plan initially was going to involve a walk around the nature preserve where we got married, but come the day of, we just weren't in the mood. Isn't that terrible? lol We keep missing the vintage fairs this spring and summer due to conflicting plans, so we've been a bit starved in that department. So instead, we drove out to the suburbs, had a lovely lunch and went to an antique mall. Julia from the Volo Antique Mall... if you're out there reading, we're coming to you next! :)

I am crazy about this rhinestone-studded nut charm bracelet!

The purse is hard to photograph because yes, it's actually covered in plastic.

Outfit details: me-made New York leaf dress and matching hair bow, vintage belt from Etsy, 50s confetti earrings from Auntdelta (though you can't really see them), bangles from here and there, nut charm bracelet from eBay, Lotta from Stockholm clogs, can't remember where the purse is from.

What do you think about these shoes? I love clogs. I have worn my red or yellow mary jane-style Sven clogs with many vintage outfits (like here). They are just so darn comfy and cute and great for casual summer outfits, even if they make my outfit a little funky or folksy. (What the heck, I've always been a little funky and folksy!) Last summer I saw a brand that had a style of peep toe clogs. Clogs that have a 1940s feel, yes please! I saved a pair to my bookmark list and of course promptly forgot about them. When I looked this spring, it seemed like the brand didn't exist any longer. So I found Lotta from Stockholm, which had peep toe clogs in a medium and low heel. Of course since then I've discovered Sven has peep toe clogs now (with way more colors) as well as Swedish Hasbeens, though the Lottas are quite a bit less expensive.

I'm still deciding if I like the look of this heel style on me. It's the same as the Hasbeens high heel... their super high looks more 40s but 3.5" is just too tall for me. But I'm in love with the rest of the shoe. And I know I'm not the only one who likes this style, I've spied peep toe clogs on Katie from The Little Red Squirrel and Jenny from Yesterday Girl, too!

Anyway, enough shoe rambling, onto the vintage finds. Not a huge haul, but we picked up some nice things. From the last time we visited this place I remembered there was a booth with oodles of inexpensive scarves and buttons, so of course I had to take a few of each home.

We got two Richter Artcraft wall plaques for the living room that are amazing. Molded gold plastic! Since we're keeping the gold-flecked mirrors on one wall, these will go between. We may decide to paint the frames to make them a little more dramatic, and because there's a bit much brown in that room. I've watched Hepcat Restorations do this many a time with amazing results.

(And wow, I actually found a room in the house that I can take natural daylight photos in, at least for a small window of opportunity in the morning.)

I love seeing things like this on the back. :)

And the find that takes the cake. For our anniversary, Mel bought me this amazing lamp for my bedroom (AKA the guest bedroom, where my closet and vanity are, and where I'll be decorating and painting).

Isn't she stunning? She's not in perfect condition... the shade has some issues, and what looks like the matching finial is actually clearly not from this lamp (hint: it's a fish) but is a good match. She's not a Reglor, but definitely in that style.

I saw her the last time we were at this place and kind of regretted not taking her home, but she was still waiting patiently for me this weekend. I love her! I can't wait to design the rest of the room with this piece in mind. She's just what the bedside table (early Heywood Wakefield) needed.

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!