Decorating for Christmas with Vintage

A couple of years ago here I gave a tour of our house at Christmas. Given that we decorate pretty much the same way every year, this is basically what it looks like again right now as we await the big day.

This year I thought I'd pick out some of my favorite ways to decorate with vintage from my Pinterest board, named, not surprisingly, "Decorating for Christmas with Vintage."

I love this use of a vintage scale and bowl, along with greens and pine cones and what is probably a vintage carved Santa, to create a festive look:

And here's another vintage scale that's topped with a wire basket filled with ornaments:

I've sold a lot of vintage scales over the years, and here's one in my shop that could work for either of the above decoration ideas:

And here's a way to use vintage canning jars:

I do want to get some bottle brush trees and try this! Meanwhile, I've sold a lot of vintage canning jars in my shop this year, but have a few left:

Here's another creative way to use canning jars, filled with candles and put into a vintage box with greens and pine cones:

A fun way to decorate with vintage in recent years has been to find old, rusty Tonka trucks and fill them with greens, Christmas ornaments, pine cones, or, as in this one, the ever-popular bottle brush trees:

I've got one Tonka truck left in my shop:

For those who live in cities, I've even got pine cones from our 25 wooded acres here in New Hampshire:

 White milk glass, which I've blogged about before, is also great when filled with greens:

And a few pieces of milk glass are still in my shop: a trumpet vase, a group of four vases, and a pedestal vase:

I also like the vintage medicine or apothecary bottles, which are painted white and filled with greens and small glass ornaments:

If this works in your decor, here are some vintage bottles in my shop, which I filled with greens: 

There are so many great ways to use vintage items in your Christmas decor. Right now the only vintage Christmas decorations I have left in the shop are an angel ornament and a group of molded ornaments:

However you decorate your home this year, I hope your Christmas is a joyous one and that your New Year overflows with blessings!

Bring on the Vintage Brass!

Vintage brass adds a sparkle and vitality to any decor.

Made from two natural elements, copper and zinc, the similarity of brass to gold in both flexibility and color accounts for its popularity from Medieval times to today.

Once, highly polished brass was the most desirable because it looks like gold. But today, with the surge in decorating with vintage, brass with aged patina is also sought after. And the question becomes: to polish or not to polish?

Actually, I think it's up to the preference of the owner--and the type of item. Some items I polish and some I think look great just the way they are.

Selling on Etsy: A Frustrating Lesson

It was one of those days....

Last Friday I photographed a terrific vintage glass cloche and gray marble cheese server for my Etsy shop:

I filled out most of the necessary listing forms: title, description, tags, etc., but ran out of time to finish it completely, since we were heading out to a football game in Vermont and I had to pack and otherwise get ready to leave.

A Hurricane, A Broken Mug, and Etsy

Last week most of the world was watching as one of the largest hurricanes on record, Irma, headed straight for the Caribbean islands and Florida.

Since we have friends in the USVI, Puerto Rico, and throughout Florida, including my brother in Tampa, our concern, focus, and prayers for all in Irma's wake was intensely personal.

Fortunately, all our loved ones were safe, with only minimal damage, but the devastation throughout this region was massive, to say the least.

Just after the worst of it had passed, I heard a "cha-CHING" from my iPhone, signaling a sale in my Etsy shop. I looked to see what had been sold:

Fabulous Finds & A New Friend at the St. James Fair, Woodstock VT

My daughter, who lives in Woodstock, Vermont, said I absolutely had to come. The St. James Fair there, now in its 92nd year, was something not to miss.

We live about an hour and a half away in New Hampshire, so it's not a long drive. And since it was a great excuse to spend the weekend with the family, we drove over Friday night for dinner.

But on Saturday morning, at 9 a.m., my daughter and I were there, scouting out what we wanted to make a mad dash for once the ribbons encircling the tents were cut precisely at 10 a.m.

Decorating my home for Christmas with vintage

Last week, after sharing some holiday decorating with vintage ideas that I found on the internet and put on one of my pinterest boards called "Decorating for Christmas with Vintage," I promised that I'd show you around my house and some of the ways I decorate with vintage.

First of all, I'll take you to my kitchen. Our house is just barely vintage, as in 1990 we purchased a high, wooded parcel of land in New Hampshire and in 1992, after clearing some of the trees, we built a one-room cottage (my husband purchased a book called "Building Thoreau's Cabin" and began building) which, once finished, served as our living room, dining room, and bedroom (that ladder leads up to a sleeping loft, which we now use for storage; on the ceiling is part of our extensive basket collection).

Decorating for Christmas with Vintage

I love Pinterest!

Whenever you find something you like on the internet, there's always a place to save it there--just put it on one of your boards or create a new one.

Recently I was searching for ways to decorate for Christmas using vintage items. And I found some great new ideas. So all I had to do was hit the round red P button and save them to my new board: Decorating for Christmas with Vintage.

Below are some of the ideas I especially liked....

Using vintage glass jars as candle holders, setting them into an old box, and filling with greens and pinecones:

My Etsy Studio

Okay, first off, I often dream of having the perfect studio: white walls, tall windows with great natural light, lots of room to store all my items and pack them up when purchased,,,,,

Etsy Changes: New Shop Look, New Seller Websites

Changes abound on Etsy today.

Well, they were rolled out a few days ago and most of the sellers are still reeling from the shock of  so much newness confronting them all at once: new shop looks and now "Pattern," a previously un-announced "stand-alone" website being offered, for a monthly fee, to sync in with each seller's Etsy shop. 

Vintage Hats and Etsy

This week some of my vintage hats were featured in "50 Gorgeous Vintage Hats" in a fun blog
called "We Heart Vintage," written by Mary, who--according to her bio--is "a mum, web designer and vintage-addict from a small village in the UK":

You really should take a look at the amazing array of hats featured here--such a wide variety of colors and styles, really interesting!

Celebrating Three Years on Etsy

Three years ago this month I took the plunge and put my first items up on Etsy.

Actually I joined in December 2010, but it took me months to figure out what was going on. If you want to read how it all started, you can check out my first post titled "What's Etsy?"

Which was followed by my second post, titled "First Listing," and then "Filling Up My Shop Little by Little."

In April 2011 I finally made my first sale, a Beacon Hill Staffordshire dinner plate:

which I recount in a post titled "Life So Far on Etsy." Today I wouldn't take a photograph for my shop like that, because I now prefer to shoot against a white background--for a lot of reasons, one of them being a consistent "look" among the listings and another the fact of being more often picked up in treasuries, which hopefully gives the seller more exposure to a wider buying audience.  These things you pick up and learn as you go along. Not every Etsy seller agrees with photographing against a white background, but I've become a die-hard about this.

The Yellow Vintage Shirt: A Story

A friend sent me this today ~ it's a lovely story about a vintage yellow shirt (unknown author!), so I thought I'd pass it along:

The yellow shirt had long sleeves, four extra-large pockets trimmed in black thread and snaps up the front. It was faded from years of wear, but still in decent shape. I found it in 1963 when I was home from college on Christmas break, rummaging through bags of clothes Mom intended to give away.. 'You're not taking that old thing, are you?' Mom said when she saw me packing the yellow shirt. 'I wore that when I was pregnant with your brother in 1954!'

An Unexpected Gift on Etsy

(Note written 4/7/16: For some inexplicable reason, all the pictures that were on this blog have disappeared, but I'm leaving the text here, because I still like the story ~ sorry not to have it illustrated as formerly!)
 
I'm getting ready to list a Norwegian wool cape on Etsy--a cape that belonged to my mother.

I've sold a lot of her things since I opened my Etsy shop--mostly jewelry, which she was especially fond of and collected at church sales and yard sales; some of it Dad gave her, too, for birthdays or Christmas. I've sold even her vintage thread on wooden spools (she was a great seamstress) to another Etsy seller who lives in Indonesia.

An interesting Etsy sale, the Examiner, & Life in General

Starting out with "life in general," I haven't written a post for a month--hard to believe that so much time has gone by--but I must admit it's a challenge just keeping up with the stuff I'm doing on a daily basis: writing two articles a week for Examiner.com, putting items up on my Etsy shop, writing press releases for the Sharon Arts Center, babysitting my two youngest grandchildren every afternoon, and doing all the other things that have to be done to maintain a household. Not to mention spending time with my husband and friends and family members....

But everybody is busy these days--it doesn't matter who you are or what you do, we're all busy!

In addition to writing local antiquing articles for the NH Examiner, I've done some fun pieces as Vintage Home Decor writer for the national Examiner, such as:

Happy 4th of July!

This is what we had for dessert today after our chicken barbecue, deliciously made and beautifully decorated by good friend Bonnie:

We had a lovely time celebrating our nation's independence with great friends. My decorations consisted of two flags stuck into flower pots on either side of our front door, but look at these fantastic decorations by Debra of Common Ground:

Design Sponge-type Food Mills Found on Etsy

In a previous post I briefly mentioned and pictured this colander/food mill beautifully repurposed on Design Sponge:

Toot: My Recent Examiner Articles on Antiquing & Vintage

Okay, this is shamelessly tooting my own horn, but just in case you haven't clicked on the right sidebar, where my Examiner articles are located, I thought I'd give some titles out for those who might be interested:

"Where, Oh Where Have All the Bargains Gone"

Wherein I discuss one place I find them...

"Etsy? What's Etsy?"

Which I wrote after everyone kept asking me...

Spring in all its forms: snow, rain, cold, garden vintage, flower earrings....

It snowed the day before Easter here in the Northeast. Unbelievable to wake up to that white stuff, and not just coming down--all over the ground!

Thankfully the temps rose and melted everything before our family Easter egg hunt, which this year was more complicated as treasure maps and clues had to be designed for three different ages: the littles, the middles, and the teens. My husband is the mastermind, so he spent Easter Saturday trying to craft hunts for each age range that weren't too hard or too easy. Way too much candy was consumed the following day by the littles, the middles, and the teens, but they had a lot of fun trying to find their candy baskets.

And even though I didn't have any candy, I did partake of way too much turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes and stuffing, ham, that old faithful green bean dish with French Fried onion rings that shows up several times a year, and my daughter's special dessert filled with whipped cream, strawberries, custard, and Oreo cookies.

Which is why we keep a huge tub of Tums in our bathroom.

Writing About Antiquing for Examiner.com

Years ago I wrote an antiques column, first for the Morristown Record in Morristown, NJ, and then for the state newspaper, the Newark Star Ledger. It was a lot of fun writing those columns, and back then I mostly wrote about my personal antiquing adventures out and about with my husband and daughter. I reviewed shops and antique centers all over New Jersey and wrote a bit about my own antique specialty--American primitive furniture and accessories.

Now my daughter is grown, we've all moved up to New Hampshire, and some of the grandchildren are taking an interest in antiques and collectibles--particularly my eldest grandson, whom I've taken with me on Saturday morning yard sale excursions. Both of us delight in the thrill of the hunt and the joy of discovering true bargains. He's put some of his treasures on Ebay and was the one who encouraged me to start selling vintage on Etsy.com.

All about roosters

I have a thing about roosters--for me they symbolize all things country.

Symbolically, roosters have a long history in world cultures: the ancient Greeks believed the rooster, with its hearty morning "cock-a-doodle-do," was a sign of victory over night. In Christianity, since a rooster crowed three times after the apostle Peter denied Christ, it became a symbol of his passion and resurrection. And even now a rooster on a weathervane (something we're looking forward to having one day, hopefully a nice big copper one) symbolizes a watchful vigilance over evil.