vintage

For anyone who doubts…

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… that we earn our keep; for all those who think that any fool could buy stuff in & just sell it on at a profit…

There’s knowledge, and judgement, and flair, time and sheer bl**dy elbow grease involved too. In the words of the art critic, I know what I like, and I know the kind of thing my customers are looking for too. I know where best to look for it, and how to spot the things that others have overlooked. I usually have a good idea of when things are worth investing a bit of time & effort in, and also when they really are past reclaiming, although of course, they may now have a use other than what they were originally intended for. I’ll give you an example of something that I picked up this morning in our local market’s car boot section. It had been a small vanity case, originally made in Spain, probably in the 1950s, possibly early 60s, by the styling and by the fact that it had a very brittle & decayed plastic lining. It was utterly filthy, but visibly sturdily made, with a stylish, if dirty, brass handle, hinges & catch, but seemingly forever open now as the catch really didn’t want to engage. What I could see, if I could clean it up a bit, is a jewellery display for my stall, even if the lock never works again. So home it came, as part of a 3-for-£1 job lot, along with a child’s Anna Karenina-style sheepskin hat & some rather decayed War Office flying maps. 33.3p is not a lot to risk, if it all goes wrong.

So, here’s the top after an first experimental swab:

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Evidently this method is going to work – it might have dissolved the covering, or not shifted any of the dirt – but it did. Back & side before:

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And after:

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A bit of WD40, a bit of Brasso, a tweak with some aircraft engineer’s cranked needlenose pliers and hey presto! The outside of my new jewellery display box is clean and the catch is working once more. It’s not pristine, it’s clearly seen a lot of use over the years; I could easily go down to The Range & buy something “vintage-style” that’s never been used, but that’s not authentic, or very interesting, and would probably cost a lot more. The next project is to make a suitable lining, so I need to find a fabric that’s right for the age & style of the box, that will also show off glittery & shiny things to good effect. Not to mention a mirror to fit inside the lid. Give me a few days & see what I come up with!

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Editing to add: on re-reading, I can’t help noticing the tone of sheer indignation in the first paragraph! I should explain; it’s in response to a conversation with a dear friend who I know will never read this. Bless her, it’s apparent that she thinks that it’s a “nice little hobby” she could take up when she retires, and maybe she could, but it’s not quite as simple as trotting round the charity shops, picking up “old things that no-one else would notice” & selling them on Ebay at your leisure, any more!

Awesome…

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A few years back, there was a little shop in our town, in the same row that I tried running a shop in more recently. It was an absolute treasure trove of gorgeous vintage & antique household textiles & haberdashery, and the elderly lady who ran it was friendly, helpful, kindhearted (she often let me have part-skeins of embroidery thread from workboxes for, say, 10 or 20p) and inspirational. It featured in several national magazines as one of those quirky & glorious one-off emporiums that we British can excel at, given half a chance & reasonable business rents & rates. But sadly the rent & rates edged upwards as the proprietor’s health edged downwards, and eventually she had to give up. I always wondered what had happened to her stock… Quoting from elsewhere online:

“I’ve had an unexpected & astonishing weekend. It was our annual Folk Festival, when the population of our little town goes from 5,000 to about 20,000 for two days of colourful, musical mayhem. But I hardly got to see any of the processions, workshops, dances etc. because early on, I stumbled across an absolute treasure trove. There was a small market down one of the back streets, and someone  was selling off some old textiles etc. at very sensible prices. I’m “doing” a major festival as a trader later this summer & have been terrified I don’t have nearly enough good stock; things I’m proud to be rehoming at a profit, if you know what I mean. But I was able to pick up some very nice things at a very decent price, even if we’ll be eating beans for the rest of the month!

I got chatting to the guy selling them & eventually, after a bit of digging, it emerged that it was leftover stock from one of the little shops in town, one of my favourite-shops-of-all-time in fact, that stopped trading a few years ago when the proprietor became too elderly & ill to carry on. The end result is that I shall be talking to him later in the week about the rest of her leftover stock, which sadly has not been well-stored in the interim, but still has value of a kind, even if a fair bit of it isn’t saleable any longer. I actually think I’m very privileged to be handling some of these items; think lace baby bonnets going back to the early 1800s, hand-embroidered Victorian bloomers, 30s crepe-de-chine hankies edged with handmade lace – that sort of thing.”

Some of it is literally shredding in our hands; for example the silk/glazed cotton/lace cushion cover above, which is most likely French (there’s another one, in even worse condition, with Souvenir de France embroidered on it. A good clue as to its origins, I feel!) where the cotton backing & lace are intact but the weft threads of the cover have just gone to dust; the warp threads are all that’s holding that embroidery together. The baby bonnet, which is the piece I recognised from the old shop, is also shredding to dust as it’s handled; several years crumpled into sealed black plastic binliners in a hot loft have not done much for the development of age-stains & mould spots, either. It’s a shame to touch it & hasten its decline and I feel quite inadequate to the task of trying to preserve what’s left in decent condition. But I suspect it would just end up at the Tip otherwise, if unsold. And I know that the old lady, and the untold hundreds of stitchers behind her, stretching back at least as far as 1800, would be far happier to see what remains of their exquisite work being used & admired, even if that means cutting it up to remake into something new, than made into J-cloths & used for wiping sinks.

So now I have a huge task before me; I need to learn as much as possible, in as short a time as possible, about lace, so that I don’t accidentally destroy or flog off for pennies, something wonderful that should remain intact & be properly preserved for posterity… It’s a great opportunity, but also a huge responsibility.

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When will I ever learn…?

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Well. It’s been one of those “when-will-I-ever-learn?” days. I know I have ENOUGH stock to do the festival with now, although there are still things I’d like to have and think would be fun. But I don’t need any more, and I’m struggling to store what I already have. However I developed a nasty case of Ebay finger last weekend and put in a rock-bottom bid on something I would never normally have looked twice at, vis. a bundle of binbags allegedly containing “vintage” clothing. My reasoning was that it was, if not exactly close by, fairly accessible, and there looked to be enough that it was likely there’d be at least a couple of decent pieces in there, which would cover the cost of buying it plus the transport costs of fetching it, and hopefully more. I wouldn’t have gone above the initial bid, though, and I thought there’d probably be dealers closer to it who would swoop at the last minute & drive the price up. They didn’t. I won.

So yesterday I asked for the address to collect from, today being the first day I was free to pick up. And was a little miffed to find that the bags weren’t so easy to reach after all, but 20 miles further on from where Ebay had placed them, well off the beaten track. They were where the seller works, not where he lives. But I girded my loins, allocated more time & went anyway, though by now I’d convinced myself that I was driving a long way – and back again too! – for stuff that was likely to be mostly rubbish, and had lain awake half the night mentally kicking myself. When I arrived, there were at least twice as many bags as had been shown in the picture; luckily I had the larger car with me, the one where all the back seats fold flat to give a load-space not dissimilar to a small van. But it was touch & go; I had to belt several bags into the front passenger seat & drive back without any rear view to speak of, just using my door mirrors. Worryingly, the glimpses I’d got where the bags had split weren’t very promising – bobbly jumpers, greying underwear, lots of socks. However, it was a lovely day (though I’d rather have been outside in it than driving) and Classic FM played some of my favourites, and the road was reasonably clear & free of recklessly competitive idiots, so a smooth & swift journey both ways soothed my soul a little.

When I got back, I had a welcome spot of home-made French Onion soup, then we set to; 3 girls & I spent all afternoon sorting clothes. And phew! Indeed there was some decent stuff, enough to make it well worth my while to have gone; a few high-value items and a reasonable amount of useful stuff that I suspect will be very handy to have & will sell for a pound or two; those pounds add up quite quickly. There are even some things in there that we’re keeping; a brand new pair of comfortable, soft red leather shoes that fit me like a glove, a very warm & practical dark blue wool serapé that’s round my shoulders now, and a lifetime supply of just about brand new, decent nightwear in my size. The shoes alone will have cost more than I paid for the whole lot. But I’ve also taken one full bag of donations (some things still in their original packaging) and three of rags (worth money again now) to a local charity shop, and there are at least 10 full bags waiting to be picked up by our indefatiguable local jumble collector, who appears to have a bottomless garage. And the washing machine has been going full blast cleaning things that will be dismantled for fabric – for example, a large quantity of cotton paisley pyjamas, well past selling on but made from lovely fabric – or felting.

So all in all, I’ve come out of this escapade without too much damage. Actually I think I’ve been very lucky; bidding on something sight unseen, age & quantity unknown, is pretty stupid, really. But all’s well that ends well. Now – where the heck am I going to put it all…?

Steaming mad!

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Yet again, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew 😉  I’ve signed up to do not one, but two stalls at a major festival this summer. All I can say in my defence is that it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I know it will be huge fun. But I really hadn’t thought it through; I need five days worth of stock! And the thing about properly vintage stuff is, they’re not making any more of it.

So, although I’ve had a couple of major haberdashery “finds” lately, I’ve also had to start buying stuff in, sight unseen. And the results have been very variable! The first “job lot”, a sack full of maxi dresses from the 60s & 70s, was utterly delightful; virtually all clothes that I would have loved to have been able to wear back then, if I could have a) afforded them, or b) had the skills to make them (which I’ve painstakingly acquired since) c) had anything to wear them to or d) fitted into them – Twiggy has a lot to answer for! Just one dress made me blench, a salmon-pink nylon extravangza with white lace & ruffles. But maybe someone out there will love it…

The job lot of lurex clothing was a bit hit & miss; I won’t lose out for having bought it, because there are over a hundred items & the vast majority are saleable. Some are absolute treasures, but quite a few don’t really qualify as vintage, as they have holographic sequins, which I’m fairly sure didn’t come into common use until the mid 90s. And two items were not just dubious, but wrecked; a pair of glittery trousers which smelt strongly of smoke also had extensive mouse damage, and a top had been badly hacked off above the waist in an abandoned attempt to make it into a bolero.

But another delight has been the velvet jackets. We lived in velvet jackets from about ’76 to about ’82; I’m pretty sure I had at least three at any given time. All bought in charity shops, needless to say. But they are a bit of a nightmare to clean, so a sack full of crumpled velvet is going to be a bit of a challenge… Luckily I have a steam cleaner, which came to me for free a couple of years ago. I’m still investigating what it can do; I’ve been a bit reluctant to use however many kilowatts it gobbles up, given our ever-escalating fuel prices, but I’m even more reluctant to slosh chemicals around or pay dry-cleaning prices. And I’m thrilled with the results of a few minutes steam on the velvet; it took about two minutes to go from this:

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to this:

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There’s still work to do, not to mention about 20 more jackets to steam, but I’m beginning to believe it’s do-able now. And come to think of it, it might even give me an excuse to hang onto, at least temporarily, the beautiful Lloyd Loom ottoman that came my way last week; the fabric on the top is original & very lovely, but quite badly stained, yet I can’t bear to rip it off & replace it with something more to modern tastes. But it’d be a very good thing to store half a ton of semi-vintage lurex in & sell it from…

A point of view…

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Went carboot-cruising with DD1 this morning, and came home with a very respectable haul from the bootsale area of our local market, I’m delighted to say, despite the fact that probably more than half of the sellers there are actually regular traders rather than people emptying their attics. But then I went on to another sale elsewhere; I knew it was likely to be more upmarket than the other one because of the “posh” venue, but some of the prices were eyewatering! I’d halfway expected to find people packing up as I was so late, but most of the stalls were still laden. Which isn’t surprising, when one of the vendors was charging £16 for a small rectangle of fabric, just big enough to scrape a cushion out of. Yes, it was nice Sanderson fabric, and probably half of what she’d paid for it new, but that is NOT a boot-sale price. If I want to pay half the new price for posh fabric, I’ll wait for a sale in at our very-good local interior designers & have a choice of fabrics.

And as for the gentleman who happily sold me a lovely ebony glove-stretcher for 50p, a matching ebony & ivory clothes brush also for 50p, and then spoilt it all by asking £5 for a white enamel milk jug with cracks, that someone at some point had filled with orange paint, which was thickly plastered inside & splashed all over the outside, oh dear…

I’m not daft, I know enamel is hot just now. But that poor jug was past it before the paint incident; you might have got some daft banker-on-secondment to pay £5 for it with cracked enamel. But liberally plastered with well-dried-on orange paint, too? I think not… but I’m very happy with the glove-stretcher & the clothes brush anyway. They’re beautiful, if not currently fashionable, and have true & lasting value.

I go out to boot & jumble sales with a change-purse filled with £20 of small change. I may or may not have more money with me, and if I saw something that I knew to be a real bargain – a Timbertops spinning wheel, say – I might dig into other resources. But mostly I manage to keep well within what’s in my purse. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not intending to be mean, and I don’t begrudge a decent price for a decent article, and yes, I do know what it’s like to crawl out of bed on a freezing morning to try to earn a few extra pennies to keep the wolf from the door because I cut my teeth on car boot sales, but if you want to do well at car-booting, don’t charge too much!

I found one of my friends there, and she’d done well & enjoyed herself, by charging between 50p – £2 for good quality, serviceable clothes. The guy selling healthy, well-grown, unusual perennial plants like Saponaria for £1 each had clearly done well too, and deservedly so, and I was happy to add to his profits. And the lady selling delicious home-made fudge deserved every penny of her earnings. But charging nearly as much for everyday things as they cost new, or as much for stuff that really is past its best as you’d pay for top-quality items in an antique shop, is a sure-fire recipe for going home with a car full of unwanted items you brought with you. If you have something of real value to sell, chances are that a car boot sale isn’t the best place to sell it.

Yes, I mostly buy with a view to selling on. But I will have put work into the items that go onto my stall; every handcranked or treadled sewing machine & spinning wheel will have been serviced & supplied with instructions, feet, needles, & bobbins. Fabric, clothing & table linen has usually been washed, mended & starched if appropriate, pressed, trimmed & measured for pricing. Patterns have been checked; some of the older ones have up to 20 fragile pieces to identify & smooth out. Books are checked for defaced & missing pages, and so on & so forth. So if you want the same price as I’m likely to get for it, I’m not going to buy it from you! (Although, of course, someone else may.) And if you want more than I’d get for it, you’re probably not being realistic.

It’ll be a while before I have a chance to do a car-boot sale or something similar myself. But I have a garage full of assorted non-vintage clutter that I need to dispose of; let’s see if I can take my own advice when the time comes & let it go at a price that people are happy to pay!

 

Might be a bit quiet for a week or two…

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… because 1) DS3 is coming home – hip-hip-hooray! – from his 9 months studying in Chile, and 2) I’m going to have some “premises” again, for a while at least. I’ve taken a small stall at Molly’s Den, a nearby vintage/retro warehouse, where I hope to have some of my less-portable wares on offer 7 days a week, without tying myself up in knots trying to run a shop, restock it and run workshops too! So I’ll be tied up with sorting, pricing & preparing the space for a bit. I’ll see how it goes, but it will cost me just £5 a month more than a storage container, with the benefit that my stuff will not just be dry & safe & out from under everybody’s feet here, but it’ll actually be on sale too, and potential customers will be able to try things out.

To celebrate, I think I might organise a bit of a giveaway, inspired by Frugal Queen’s Bank Holiday giveaway; it won’t be as big as hers, but I do have rather a lot of small, interesting bits & bobs in need of a good home that isn’t shared with 4-6 other people & 3 cats! So, watch this space…

 

I’m sitting here, toasty warm…

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…snow on the ground, sky thick with nasty needly little flakes that are more like hail. The heating’s on in the background but not blasting away; the conservatory’s wrapped in bubblewrap and the curtains & quilted blinds have stayed shut in the rooms that aren’t in use today. And I’ve been out and about with my camera, in my wonderful secondhand felted-wool coat (best bargain ever! If not exactly cheap…) my long-deceased great-aunt’s sheepskin gloves, my sturdy secondhand North Face boots, my 20p-at-a-jumble-sale handknitted wool jumper in shades of red & pink, and an assortment of other unlikely garments. I probably look like a small round ball of random vintage textiles but I’m warm, dry & happy!

Our local market was open for business this morning; many of the traders had travelled for miles to get here but sadly most of their customers hadn’t bothered, so I scooped up some excellent bargains. Stallholders pay for their stalls in advance, and run the risk of losing advantageous pitches if they don’t turn up; customers don’t run such immediate risks but may find their favourite stallholders have gone away or even gone under if they don’t support their efforts whenever possible. However, it really isn’t a day for driving if you don’t have to; luckily it’s an easy walk for me and my (reclaimed) shopping trolley, given sturdy weatherproof boots. And I do have the space to preserve & store my bargains.

We have enough supplies stashed away to coast through several weeks if necessary, but many people aren’t able to store much food, or even proper clothing for bad weather. A few years back, when I was working in sheltered housing, I was blowing my top about elderly tenants trotting off to the shops in the snow & ice in woefully inadequate clothing – high-heeled boots, thin tights, plastic raincoats, no hats or gloves – when one of them stopped me in my tracks by enquiring, “Where would we keep clothing for weather we hardly ever get? And where could we store extra food so we didn’t have to go out?” It was all too true; their “flats” were glorified bedsits with an alcove for a bedroom, a tiny living room and a kitchenette so small you had to choose between a proper cooker (as opposed to a microwave) or a storage cupboard. Adequate, perhaps, if you  lived a very active & social lifestyle so you didn’t need any room for, say, a sewing machine, or books, or could afford to spend all your winters on the Spanish Costas, as indeed many had envisaged when they moved into them 20 years before, as soon as their kids had flown the nest. Home was just somewhere to sleep, TV would take care of all your entertainment needs if you couldn’t get out, and there was always Meals on Wheels…

I do love the Tiny Houses that you see online, and many of them have roots that go back a long way, to a far more self-reliant & mobile lifestyle; the gypsy caravans, shepherd’s huts & narrowboats, the converted buses & railway carriages. You can make a home and a life almost anywhere, and a good one, without a lot of space, if you’re happy not to put down roots. And it’s very easy to accumulate far too much stuff; stuff that acts as an anchor, so that you can never spread your sails to the winds of Fate without being swamped. But equally, it’s possible to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not have enough space to store the things you really do need, even if you don’t need them all the time. I know I err on the side of having too much (which I’m constantly battling against) and that occasionally, in extreme cases of hoarding, this can prove fatal. But that’s not as likely as crashing your car  as you rush to the supermarket in the snow because you have nothing in to feed the kids, or slipping & breaking a hip on the ice because Meals on Wheels couldn’t get through, and you have no sensible footwear because you have nowhere to keep it…

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Rainy Day Project – Part II

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Well, what can I say? It may have been halfway decent weather elsewhere, but here in East Dorset it has been grey & drizzly ever since I wrote the last post. So I’ve got further, faster, under the stairs, than I thought possible…

From this:

A starting point… you can see what I’m going to do, but it looks like quite a lot of work.

Through this:

Hmm… that wasn’t too bad, didn’t take as long as I thought…

To this:

Well, just about there now! Just the fiddly bits to do…

Not sure I can quite believe it! It’s not “finished” & I’m not sure it ever will be, any more than any room in any living home can be; there’s always something new to accomodate or something different to be done. But when I say “new” it’s a relative term; nothing in there has been bought new, except the network printer (under the embroidery) which we’ve had for nearly a year. Even my Ipad, which has also been with us for a while, was a refurb. And I have stuck to my guns and not spent one single penny; it’s all been done with stuff we already had!

 

 

Well, I’ve always wanted one of those…

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…some days just have a lucky star. It was great to see one of my firm e-friends last night & today; she had to bring one of her offspring down for a university interview, left him with his sister in Southampton & came on down to stay the night and most of today with me. Whilst there were hardly any breaks in the conversation, we did take 10 minutes off from nattering to pop down to the local tip. The manager had saved a tin of buttons for me, bless his cotton socks (buttons are a steady earner for me) and there was a pair of quite astonishingly OTT but splendid red glass beaded chandelier-like ceiling pendant light fittings that simply had to come home with me – irresistible, though I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do with them. They were a little battered so I’ve performed a little delicate surgery to make them look whole again by amalgamating some of the sets of glass droplets. Now all I need is the right setting for them…

But the goodies didn’t end there. There was a nicely-weathered 50’s style green & cream enamel saucepan,  a dinky single egg poacher, an interesting plate, a manicure set which has hundreds of uses (very few of them anything to do with my raggedy fingernails) and, glory of glories, an intact & clean Spong mincer, still with its grating/slicing attachment. A couple of years ago I realised that I needed some kind of manual food mill, and bought a rather elegant tall & slender stainless-steel one half-price in the Lakeland sale. But to be honest, the amount of sheer effort it cost me to grind enough coffee beans for a mug of coffee, or  a handful of oats for a crumble, has meant that it’s spent most of its time with us resting in the cupboard. Then a few weeks back, a battered little old blue Spong appeared down at the dump, which I couldn’t resist rescuing, and in a spirit of idle experimentation, once it was clean I threw a handful of oats into it and turned the handle. Perfect, fine oatmeal, in seconds, with virtually no effort! The only problem was convincing the Other Half and the Offspring that anything that came out of this well-used & somewhat tatty item could possibly be hygienic enough to eat…

So the arrival of this almost-pristine beige one is cause for some celebration on my part. It’s missing one blade, the coarse one, which I can make up from the older blue one, which came with two. There’s a market for these stylish little vintage items, so someone will get a good, working, genuinely-useful bargain at the next Boscombe Vintage Market, and I get to keep the tidier one. As aforementioned, it even has the grater/slicer attachment, with both drums & the pusher. I’d struggle to feed my whole family just with  one of these little gadgets but I do have a bigger, newer mincer that does meat, and this one is lighter & neater for everyday tasks. As well as easier on the eye…

It hasn’t just been a good day, but a good month; I’ve been rescuing things from my mother’s downsizing chuck-out, including a set of battered but still-usable egg-poaching rings – which can, of course, also be used to cut scones & cookies out – and acres of aged, torn sheet-music which has 101 uses in card making, altered art & bookbinding. And I found a few small items in the charity shops local to the vintage market, including a lovely soft yellow flower-printed 70s flannelette sheet which will make a marvellous quilt backing for £1 (in need of a wash, which it’s since had) and a pretty little eggcup which is very much in the style of Susie Cooper, one of my favourite china designers, for just 20p.

There is of course the usual problem – where to store it all? But I’m really lucky; anything that turns out not to be worth the space I’ve allotted to it can be popped onto my stall & sold on. It’s the perfect excuse, and the very best form of “recreational shopping” – I get to enjoy the hunt & spend very little money on items I really do like & want to keep, but if that doesn’t work out, I know I will get my money back at the very least, and usually a little bit more as well. Viva Vintage!

Vintage Finds