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!'

Etsy and Weddings

I had the happy task today of sending two packages off to brides: one item, which I blogged about in my last post, was a blue bitters bottle in the shape of a fish, which a woman in London bought, telling me that she was putting together a collection of "posy" bottles to use at her wedding reception:

The other was for a woman who just got married and wanted these two heart boxes to use as a place for keeping their rings safe should she and her husband ever have to take them off for some reason:

Oops! Or: There Goes Another Etsy Sale...

Well, it had to happen sooner or later.

That morning I'd gone out into the garden and found that the bleeding hearts, narcissus, and purple lilacs were in full bloom. And I thought: what a perfect time to photograph a bunch of my vintage glass bottles and put those up in my shop!

So I picked an armload of flowers, stuck them in a pot of water, retrieved the bottles from my storage shed out behind our house, and went up to the stair landing that I use as my photography studio. I've got a small table there, which I cover with a piece of white poster board, and put another white poster board behind it. I got out my camera and started shooting, doing the cobalt blue bottles first with a few stalks of bleeding hearts and narcissus:

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.

When Selling on Etsy Lifts My Spirits

I've been an Etsy.com seller now for a year and a half, and have made a lot of new friends through selling items and buying them myself (see here and here here ) as well as through the teams I'm on, particularly the two I'm a Leader on: the Etsy Pickers and Sellers Team and the Farmhouse Treasures Team, along with the Vintage Etsy Society Street Team, which has opened up two new groups I belong to: the Etsy Vintage Elites and Etsy's Best Vintage.

But sometimes when items are sold I find out why the person purchased it--and in the case I'm writing about today, it's this quilt I sold in September:

Etsy Feedback

It always makes me feel good when I check my shop and see that a buyer has left positive feedback.

Today when I logged in, I found that one buyer, who also happens to be a seller herself--Rachel, from Sweet Briar Rose, whose shop can be found here--wrote to thank me for a vintage Columbia scale I sold her (really the best I've found so far--sometimes you have pangs of "why did I sell that?!"):

An Etsy International Friendship Part 2

Last March I wrote about how an Etsy purchase turned into an international friendship--if you click here you can read it.

The short version of the story is that another Etsy seller, who lives in Indonesia, purchased a bunch of wooden spools with thread from me that had belonged to my mother. During the course of  Etsy "convos" back and forth, Henny Augustien--who lives with her family in Semarang, a coastal city on northern Java Island, Indonesia and has an Etsy shop called HennySeashell--shared some of her life and I shared some of mine and we found we had lots in common. That's how our "international friendship" was born.

Recently I saw a beautiful pillow cover in Henny's  shop: