The Beauty of Vintage Bottles

Over the years I've sold a lot of bottles in my Etsy shop.

Last week a fellow teammate of mine on the Etsy Pickers and Sellers Team (known affectionately as "Epsteam") bought this bottle:

She said she has a collection of bottles displayed over her kitchen cabinets and took them all down recently to wash. After rearranging them, she found she could use a few more, so went looking on Etsy ~ "Of course I searched on "Epsteam glass bottles"!" she said.

A Passion for Books: An Encounter on Etsy

Books have always been a special love. I was a reader from the moment I grasped "Run, Spot, run!"

As I grew up, books were given to me for birthdays and Christmas because my family and friends knew I loved to read. Once I was out of college, married and living on a budget, I started buying books at sales, a practice that continues to this day. I always look forward to that final day "bag sale," where you can stuff in as many as you can for a few dollars!

Vintage Fashion and My New Etsy Model

There's a whole new look to my shop these days with the arrival of my new model:

Here she's photographed wearing a lime green silk sheath dress from the 70s. A great dress, but her presence among the pictures in my shop adds a real buoyancy to all the listings. This is a story about how her arrival came to be:

Plate Passion

I love plates. Colorful vintage plates. Not only are they functional, but beautiful when displayed in a hutch:

For a long time I've been collecting blue and white plates, like the display above.

New Year, New Etsy "Studio"

(Note  4/7/16: For some inexplicable reason, a number of photographs used to illustrate this blog post disappeared. I have re-written the post, accordingly, as I'm loath to simply delete it. Hopefully you'll enjoy it anyway!)

One of my New Year's resolutions is to write a new blog post every week. Well, we'll see how that goes...

So today, being snowbound in New Hampshire (schools are closed for the second day in a row, probably just because it's so cold here right now with temps of about 3-5 degrees and a good wind chill going), 

I decided that this was a good time to write a little bit about my new Etsy "studio."

A Reunion on Etsy

One of the fun things about selling vintage on Etsy is the people you meet, both customers and other sellers. I've written here about some of these encounters.

Recently I re-encountered an old friend, B. J. Elvgren, who sells her amazing handmade creations on Etsy (here). Years ago we'd met each other through our husbands--both playwrights and both at the time teaching theatre and playwriting at universities in Virginia and New Jersey. Her husband had invited my husband to give a talk at his university and I went along, spending a wonderful several days with B.J. and Gil sight seeing, talking, and admiring their antique-filled home. B.J. also had a beautiful studio filled with her quilted creations, and I bought several pillows from her that still grace our living room couches.

Time passed, and after a hiatus of quite a few years, B.J.'s husband got in touch with mine over some business. During their email conversations, my husband happened to mention that I had an Etsy shop and gave the URL. Gil said that B.J. did, too, and almost immediately I received a convo (Etsy lingo for its internal email system) from her saying that she'd checked out my shop and loved it. So I clicked on her shop link--I knew I'd love everything because I knew how talented she was--and got back to her and before long were talking back and forth and wondering how we could all get together again.

Then, after responding to a convo from her, I went back to check my Etsy activity stream for any new purchases. Suddenly I saw that wonderful green "view order" sign on this item:

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!'