No Pattern Required

Gooooooooorgeous lights, Sara!  I am dying!  Especially over those little jumprope girls!

OK, I’ll admit it, I am a total SUCKER for any kind of vintage light! It is really bad though, because I go to all these Estate Sales and Goodwill etc., and I find all these super cute lights I cannot pass up. I think Mike is going through a little light/lamp overload. He said he may try to send me to a Vintage Lamps Anonymous – if he can find one. “Hi, my name is Sara………. 

So, on with the show kids!

These first two pictures are of some lights I found at Goodwill. The first pic shows a 1960s ? (please correct me if I am wrong) Bathroom Light Bar. This was made by Progress Lighting, all the old stickers are still on the back! And, it was made in the USA!!! I thought it was really cool because of the funky lines running through it.

This next pic is not really a light, but a ceiling light cover. I thought these were SOOOOO cute, I could not believe someone had given them away to Goodwill. You can see there are little girls jumping rope and bows all over the shades. I am guessing these are from the 1950s or early 1960s. The shades are a really thick glass (much thicker than the glass shades available now at Home Depot, or the like) and they are a bit larger too.

I have not quite decided what to do with these items yet – keep them, sell them???  Hmmmmmm, decisions……decisions!

Up next is an old Pull Down I picked up at an Estate Sale. I was SO in love with this light, but I was also being stubborn that day and did not want to pay the $30 asking price. So, I waited until half-price day, and I got it for $15. It has a walnut plate for the wall to cover the mounting bracket, and a little walnut wedge on the bottom. There was a “Made In USA” “Union Made” sticker on this but nothing else that would indicate the manufacturer. I poked around a little on the web and found this light was probably made by E.J.S. Lighting Corporation, in the mid to late 1950s. It retailed for approx. $20 back then.

This light still has the original glass shade.

And the cool pin-hole light effect on the top.

One word of caution about vintage lights. Mike had to totally re-wire this entire light. See how the wires are REALLY brittle. We are pretty sure it was from super hot light bulbs crisping up those little ole’ wires. Anyway, Mike is an Electrical Engineer, so if he can’t re-wire a light – well that would be pretty sad wouldn’t it! I would DEFINITELY NOT recommend re-wiring your own vintage light unless you are super knowledgeable about wiring and the such (this light had a ton of really intricate parts inside that housing). He did a bang up job, and now the light works fantastically – without the threat of burning the house down!

At the same Estate Sale I also bought this Kitchen Pull Down. I could not leave it behind since I was already buying the other Pull Down, and they said they were remodeling the entire house after the sale. I could just envision them throwing it into a trash heap, and – well, I just could not let that happen! No, I am not planning on having this light installed above our fireplace , we have not installed this light into our kitchen yet…. Here you see it just hanging on a hook in our ceiling. This light still has all of it’s original stickers too, and this light is a MOE light!

This light also still has the original light shade.

OK y’all stay tuned next time for more vintage lights!

P.S. Happy (early) Valentine’s Day everyone! Even if you cannot spend the day with someone special, we love everyone around here at ‘No Pattern Required’, so here is a “big wet smooch” going out to all of ya!

Happy Monday, everyone!  It’s time to crack open the book of housewife wisdom to help all you homemakers make the most of your Monday.  Or you could just admire the pretty illustrations.  That’s fine, too.

Click on the photo for a close-up!

Step Up In Style!

A stepstool will do double duty at your house…providing both a comfortable perch and a sturdy ladder right at your fingertips!

Washing windows…or hanging freshly laundered curtains? Step up on a stepstool when you do the job! Be sure to wear low-heeled shoes, trip-proof clothing.

Learn to iron sitting down.  It’s a good energy-saver…and an adjustable-height ironing board and a stepstool with good back support make ironing as easy as can be. Place dampened laundry within reach; have a table nearby for freshly-ironed flatwork and a clothes rack for dresses and blouses.

With a stepstool in the kitchen, you can conserve energy by sitting when preparing vegetables and doing lots of other tasks…and when you want to reach that topmost shelf in your cupboard, just pull out the steps and your stool becomes a ladder!  

Good news, this step stool chair is still available here!

Today I am showing another cute house in Saginaw, but remember the cavat from last week, everyone.  Don’t get too excited, there are no jobs in Saginaw.

This house is a really cute three bedroom ranch that was built in 1954.  It is about 1200 square feet and the cost is $72,900.  Once again, that is not a typo.

Cute original kitchen cabinets.  I love the shutter doors on the uppers.  I have found that is a cabinet around here.

Every mid-century house needs a little knotty pine.

Cute peach bathroom that reminds me a lot of our master bathroom. Wish they had a better picture of the floor!

This picture is a little dark, but that looks like a black asbestos tile floor and there is a cute french provincial vanity under those boxes!

And, to top it all off, a little screen porch!

Thank goodness it is the weekend, huh?  What a week.

I am happy today to be hanging out with Tom and doing stuff around the house.  Hopefully I will get my crafting things all moved downstairs so we can finish painting the guest room finally. Jeez, what a lot of work.

But now I have so much more room to spread out my stuff and really look at all my crafting goodies.  Recently, my Aunt sent me a HUGE bag of loose embroidery patterns that it looks like she got at a garage sale.  I was so pumped and now I finally have room to paw through the bag.  Lots and lots of really cute stuff here, guys, and no manufacturer’s names anywhere, so I will be posting every little thing I can get scanned.  Starting with these cuties:

Sorry the lamb is wrinkled, some of these are so fragile I am afraid to even iron them!

You’ve always wanted to know about Flag Etiquette.  Admit it.  You are standing in front of the bank trying to cash a check or in front of the courthouse waiting to pay a parking ticket, and the whipping flag above you catches your eye. You think, “I wonder why the flag in the center is higher than the others?” or ” How come it is only halfway up the pole?”  But then you have to rush to get in line or write a check to the parking people, both of which always make you angry, and then you forget about the flag entirely.

Well, wonder no more!  Thanks to this great 1965 Boy Scout Handbook, all our flag questions will be answered. And you will learn things about flags that you never even knew you needed to know. Or something.

But first, don’t you love the illustrations on the cover of this book? When I stumbled upon this at our local Salvation Army I was pretty excited.  I could make so many awesome things with this baby.

Anyway, back to the flags.

It’s all about the respect, people.

Did you know you are supposed to hoist the flag after sunrise and lower it down before sunset?? 

NEVER dip the flag in salute to a person or thing…

The flag is never drapery, nothing is ever placed on the flag and it should never touch the ground, the floor, or water under it…

Wow, lots of info, huh?  That must have been some test for a little Boy Scout. 

There, now you learned what a good Boy Scout should know about the flag.  This is the Mid-Century Lesson, people. Learn it!!

I really like mid-century vintage and reproduction lamps.  Well…maybe like isn’t strong enough. I love them!  Tom will attest to that.  I have had to be physically pulled away from lamps in the past that I wanted. Sometimes I even try to grab them at the last minute hugging them to my chest and saying things like, “I never get anything I want” and “What if I just carry it around for a while?”  Yes, a pretty lamp has the power to make me THAT crazy.

If I saw this set of blue lamps from TheRelicTrail, I am pretty sure I would throw such a fit over them. Blue ceramic lamps with gold highlights and pink shades. Pink!  Ummm…yeah, over here.  Just put them right here, please.

P.S. These are reasonable $88 for the pair. THE PAIR!!  I could maybe do better thrifting, but I am darn sure they wouldn’t have pink shades. Pink!

Ahem.

Moving on, moderntoretro is obviously trying to kill me with the coolness of this amazing swirly pendant light.  I mean really, a teardrop shaped pendant with gold swirly accents that has light hole detailing?  That isn’t even fair. Come on.

Ok, I can only comment on the coolness of this next lamp from LiseVintageLighting after I get my heart rate under control.  Seriously. Deep breaths. Whew.

Check out that flippin’ shade!  Holy mother of god, I adore it.  And the tripod effect of the base mirrored in the three-tiered shade? Design genius. You know how people buy sweaters and shirts for their little dogs? I would bring home this lamp and love it so much I would buy sweaters for it. But that would probably ruin the design. And be a fire hazard.

Okay, this lamp from avintagerevolution is pretty in pink, but I mostly am just dying over that house!!!  Look at it! What a great photo backdrop. It must be in Florida.  I would love to see pictures of the inside of that place.

I am just on a roll with the three-tiered shades, today.  I can’t tell if this lamp from smalltownsusan is gaudy or awesome.  I think this is one of those things that you have to see in person, and if you buy it pair it with a chair that isn’t too crazy.  But man, if you could pull this off it would be fantastic.

Whew, I am tired from all that excitement. I might need to go thrifting to revive myself….

Yep, you read the title correctly! And no, we haven’t jumped off the deep end.  I found this Waring cookbook at an estate sale last year, and ever since then I have been excited to try a lot of the recipes in it.  Some look really good, like Strawberry Milk Smoothee and Savory Onion Soup, and some are really scary. Of course, I picked all scary ones for this meal.

The New Waring Blendor…Serves Everyonewas first published in 1940, but the copy I got my hands on comes from 1947.  It includes, not surprisingly, recipes for all age groups from babies to the convelescent. Surprisingly it contains NO recipes for alcoholic beverages. The previous owner of this cookbook remedied that by dashing a cocktail recipe on the cover, even though all the cocktail looks like it will make is rum blended with ice.  Maybe it is for pina coladas.

In any case, yes, on the cover of the book blender is spelled “Blendor”, probably because this is mostly likely one of the first blender cookbooks ever written.  The home blender as we know it was invented in 1933 and first shown to the public by Fred Waring in 1937.  Waring began a one-man campaign to revolutionize home cooking (and sell blenders), and this fun cookbook is the result of that campaign.  It also has the recipe for another invention in it, the “Milk Smoothee”, the basis for most of today’s smoothies.

Since there were gems on every page to pick from, Tom and I had to narrow it down to a choosen few:

Pineapple Spinach Appetizer

 Mock Pate-De-Fois Gras

Sweet-Potato Apple Scallop

And…for dessert…Children’s Liver Milk Smoothee. Yep. That’s right.

As you can see, this book was so packed with interesting recipes that I didn’t want to cut any out, so I scanned and posted the entire page when I used a recipe.  You can get a close-up by clicking on the page.

And we were ready to start!

I decided to group everything in together for this post, because it didn’t actually take that long to make this meal.  And I liked this picture. Looks pretty healthy, huh?  The only scary thing is the liver.

First off is the appetizer since I wanted to drink it while we made the rest of the meal!

I really crammed in the spinach on this one.

Looks like green goddess salad dressing!

Mmmm…green.  It actualy looks kind of…pretty in these glasses.

“It’s ok! Tastes like pinapple and spinach, but it doesn’t taste bad.”

I took a sip.  It was good, not sweet or bitter, it just kind of tasted…green. I took another drink and continued with the meal.

The topping for the Sweet Potato Scallop.

The topping getting liquified.  I was surprised that the raw apples actually blended in.  I thought this would be a disaster.

The cooked sweet potatoes getting covered with the apple goo. It actually smelled really good.

Raw liver! Raw!

Ok, we didn’t use it like that.  I cooked it for the recipes, even the milk one, which has the option to use raw liver! Gag!

The pate ingredients.

Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…….

Tom, ready to dig in.  The “soup” in the bowl is actually the pate. Yummy.

We were supposed to refrigerate the pate, because it was very thin, almost like soup.

Tom, ever brave, chewing the first bite of pate.

“How is it?”

He shook his head. “Try it.”

I took a bite. “Not too…blech!!! What is that taste???”

He laughed, “I don’t know. Weird isn’t it?”

The Sweet Potato-Apple Scallop, down the hatch.

He froze.  “This tastes strange, too.”

I tasted it, and it didn’t taste bad to me.  In fact, I kinda liked it.  But the honey did make it strange.

Well, that’s it!  All done!  Tune in next week…

What?  Oh, right.  We got everything, except for……

THE LIVER MILK! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ah! Ah!

I was so agitated making this, I forgot to take a picture of its creation. God help me.

Tom picked up the glass and sniffed it. “Just tell me. Just tell me what is in this.”

I gulped. “Liver. Evaporated milk. Malt powder. Chocolate syrup.” (We didn’t have any chocolate malt powder.)

He took a deep breath.

And took a huge drink.

I didn’t even ask.  I just watched him.

“Try it,” he pushed the glass towards me.

“How is it?”

“Just try it.”

I took a couple  of deep breaths, and took a sip.  Not too bad. It just tasted like malted chocolate milk.

“Oh thank god.”

“I know.”

“If it would have tasted like liver, I would have died.”

Tom took the glass back and in a couple of gulps, it was gone.

Success!  An empty glass!

The Verdict:

Pineapple Spinach Appetizer: Actually, pretty good. I was surprised, but I actually liked it.  Not a ton, but we both drank our entire glasses full. Add some orange juice and feed it to your kids.

Sweet Potato – Apple Scallop: Good, but the honey was a little too much for Tom.  If I were to make this again, I would use corn syrup instead of honey and leave the orange out.

Mock Pate-de-Fois Gras: The Worscestershire sauce was nasty in this.  Leave it out and sub the salad oil with softened butter, add a dash of brandy or congac and it will be good to go!

Liver Milk Smoothee: We drank it and it tasted ok, but don’t do this to your kids.  Please.

Wow, so many great resources!  Thanks Jan!

Sometimes we have to bite the bullet and buy new for our MCM homes.  Thankfully, there are a lot of  ‘new’ MCM furniture and accessories out there, albeit the prices may be overboard for us on a budget. However, even if we can’t afford new, the following pictures can be used for free as a reference point in finding the real McCoy.

Roomandboard.com has some dandy MCM lookalike furniture and accessories, but, alas!  They are expensive.  This is the Reese sectional sofa that comes in different fabric colors as well as leather.  Button tufted furniture is very MCM.

Speaking of button tufted thingys, accent pillows also carried that design. SmithandNoble.com has them in a variety colors.

Replicas of George Nelson’s wall clocks are available, too from Bellacor.com.

Look at the lighting from Lampsplus.com!  The sconce  in the center is an exterior light.

Looking for one of those quilted fitted bedspreads?  Touchofclass.com has them in different colors and sizes and yes, matching button tufted pillows!

Aren’t these cat bookends cool?  Bellacor.com sells them and not on the cheap, either!  But for some reason, modern cat sculptures and wall decor were very popular.

For the MCM kitchen, here are some wonderful reproductions of those dish towels and square tablecloths courtesy of Retrobarn.com.

Did you know that our favorite MCM furniture, Heywood Wakefield, is making their Streamline furniture series again?  Visit their site at Heywood-Wakefield.com and check out the furniture.

There are even reproductions of classic toys like Slinky (in the brown box) and Lincoln Logs.  Wish Mattel Toys would re-issue their fabulous clown jack-in-the-box that came out in the late Fifties.  I would love to have one of them again and sit for hours turning the handle on the tin box, listening to Pop! Goes the Weasel and be surprised when the clown popped out!

I know that redirecting your traffic is a big no-no in blogger world, but for those of you who haven’t read it yet, go over to Retro Renovation and check out Pam’s fantastic and ultra-detailed post on vintage metal kitchen cabinets, you will be glad you did!!!

Our 1956 Steel Geneva Cabinets

By the way, in her article Pam recommends VCT tile on the floor for a 1950’s kitchen.  If you haven’t seen pictures of our kitchen before, here it is before the VCT tile:

And here it is after!

Pretty big difference, huh????

So, a lot of interesting houses for sale this week, but not many in my hometown of Midland.  I ended up going to Saginaw for houses, which is only about 15 minutes away from Midland.

Now, don’t get too excited about the specs on this house, guys.  Sure, it is tasteful and gorgeous and cheap, but no one wants to move to Sagniaw.  Mostly because there are no jobs. Which is why they have a ton of houses on the market right now.

This MCM house is about 1300 square feet and is currently going for $92,900.  No,  I didn’t not type that wrong.  Yes, that is how much it is. And it is very pretty. But you don’t want to move to Saginaw.

Love the outside, very nice.  The iron accents are great. 

Interesting kitchen. What do you think, orignal cabinets?  I was thinking no, but around the right corner is a very vintage looking shelf.  Maybe just the shelf is original.

Cute retro kitchen table. I like it.

Once again, cute.

Very simple furniture, but it looks good. I love the fireplace, that is the same door we have on our fireplace, and the mulit-colored slate hearth is an excellent touch.

Even the laundry has a great mid-century touch.  Love that light!

Love the wood floor.

 *Gasp*

Oh my god! It looks like ice cream!

I LOVE this bathroom. Soooo dreamy.  And this is the first time I have ever seen that mint green with peach fixtures.  And I have to say, I love it! The shuttered cabinets are great, too.

But don’t move to Saginaw.  Just…no.