Farmhouse Decor: White, White, Wondrous White!

Before getting onto Instagram, I had no idea how widespread the White on White Farmhouse decor had become. If you're on IG, just put "farmhouse" into the search bar and see the incredible numbers of sites, plus their followers--pretty amazing, right?

You can find the same thing on Pinterest. Although the Farmhouse crowd can get much more interactive and chatty on IG.

Being an Etsy seller who wants to keep up with the trends (my home is rustic Country, which still has its thousands of followers, but not to the extent of the current Farmhouse rage), I started tracking some of these sites and their devotees and checking out how they liked to decorate their homes. Here are some examples:

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 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: