No Pattern Required

By RetroRuth

I was so pumped about the thrifting haul three weeks ago I brought it home, unpacked it, photographed it…and then promptly forgot about the photos. Sigh. So, here are some of my thrifting finds from a few weeks ago.  Also, I love our new camera!

A vintage Danish Modern stainless steel bowl.  I dug this out of the kitchen cabinet at a estate sale with killer, rock bottom prices.  This pretty thing was 50 cents!

I officially declare it the best chip bowl ever.

This shot looks like a set of nested bowls, but it is actually….

Measuring cups!!! From the same estate sale as the bowl, and barely used.

I fell in love with “Foley” on the handles, and couldn’t walk away from them.

And excellent set of aqua melamine trays.  Not sure how old these are, but I loved them anyway.

A bunch of scarves and hair-wraps snagged from various sales. Some silk, some rayon, and some made of pure awesomeness.

A few have signatures.

This entire basket of ornaments was 75 cents at another excellent estate sale. At first I thought it meant 75 cents each, but then a really nice lady working the sale pointed out the price was for the whole basket!

Once I saw this little reindeer deer inside, I was sold.

More vintage Christmas ornaments from the same sale. This box of striped lanterns was 25 cents.

Yeah, I would say that was a pretty good haul! 

How about you guys? Find anything awesome this weekend? Let us know!

By RetroRuth

Wow!  My friend Kathryn and I recently stumbled on the most amazing estate sale.  Unfortunately, everything was priced a little too rich for us, but we sure did have a great time digging through boxes of stuff and taking pictures. A lot of pictures!  Check out the slideshow below of over 40 pictures of the house.  It had some great, colorful combos, and lots of really interesting pieces to drool over!

By RetroRuth

Welllll….it’s Monday again.  What the heck happened to the weekend??  I feel like Tom and I worked and worked and didn’t get a single thing done.  But I won’t prattle on about house repairs. Instead, I’ll give you guys some eye candy.

Behold!  Our “new” vintage vinyl sofa that Tom and I picked up recently while thrifting.  We were out originally trolling for some Tiki-themed furniture for our three season porch, but we found this bad boy for our basement instead.  Pretty sweet, isn’t it?  I love the shape of it.  It is very swank and is going to be great for the “50′s Martini” theme in the basement. 

It is also a futon, can you believe it?  It need some oil before it will fold all the way down, but it is supposed to actually fold flat.  This is good, because it is actually sprung like a mattress rather than having foam cushions.  I am pleased because then it will never get that smashed look some vintage sofas have.

The only down side is that it has that old, musty vinyl smell.  I am not sure we are going to be able to get rid of it, so I have put all my resources into figuring out a way to contain it or cover it up.

As you can see, it is already being thoroughly enjoyed by the cats.

We also picked up this excellent set of vintage vinyl rockers at the same sale.  I have to say, these are incredibly comfy and fun to watch TV in.  Not exactly the same style as the sofa, but I love ‘em just the same.

Pretty sweet, huh?

Did anyone else have some good finds over the weekend?  Let us know in the comments!

I hit a gem of an estate sale the other day, and it was so fun!  The lady who lived in the house did a lot of crewel embroidery and paint-by-numbers, and they were all over the walls of the house.  She did excellent work, too, and I was really tempted by some of them.  Unfortunately, I got there too late to snap up any of her supplies, but I did get some great cookbooks (the Andy Warhol one, Annie!) and some vintage books on gardening, which are going to make their debut on this blog any time now. Also, check out the furniture; a great dining set, living room chairs, a credenza. And the dishes were nothing to sneeze at, either!  I meant to go back for the half price day, but got distracted with other things and never made it back.  Ah well, such is life!

I have got some more pretty calendar girls for you! Check out the original post for some more pretties.

I am DY-ING over the red dress on the February girl and her awesome shoes.  Total vintage fabulous-ness.

So, here is a little treasure I picked up this summer that I forgot about until I was cleaning out the library to get ready for my parents visit.  An adorable desk pin-up calendar from 1952. 

As you can see, this lovely lady was the front sheet in the calendar.  Rather than pulling sheets off and throwing them away, the sheets were held together behind a little cardboard frame.  There is a slot at the back of the frame where old sheets could be pulled out and thrown away, or, as this owner did, shuffled behind the others to the correct month.

This pretty girl is December.  I have to tell you, I need to get boyshorts like that and those adorable heels!  Love them!

Oh, and this little calendar is about as big as a 3×5 photo frame, and at 25 cents was pretty much the find of the day at a garage sale where I also got pocket binoculars from the 1950s and some Pyrex dishes. It was a pretty sweet deal for me, and I think for the lady selling the things.  She was just happy to be rid of them!

So cute, aren’t they?  I have other plans for these rather than just being pretty.  Stay tuned on Saturday to see my embroidery attempts with these beauties.  I have a few stiches left on my matador, so stay tuned for him finished as well!

I will be posting some more of these lovely ladies, as soon as I get back to scanning!

I haven’t been posting as many of my great vintage finds as I should be, so I thought I would remedy that with this post.

I have been addicted to vintage boardgames lately, and not just the classic ones.  The ones I really like are the ones that aren’t around anymore.

Here is one that Tom and I picked up at an estate sale.  Probe is a word game kind of like hangman, except it looks a little easier.  We haven’t tried this out yet, but I am looking forward to it.

I got lucky the other day and came across a whole bunch of games at Goodwill the other day when I was out looking for records.

I have never played Go To The Head of the Class and I know it is still available new, but I couldn’t say no to the cute 1950′s game pieces. The Skittle Bowl game is really fun, we set it up and played it the other night.  Haven’t tried out the other two yet, but I am excited.  And they were all a good deal, between $2 and $3 each!

Hey, all! Here is a picture slideshow from an estate sale that Tom and I went to last weekend.  Many of you may remember this house from this post where it was featured as a house for sale. The unique thing about this house was that the classic MCM furnishings inside were available to purchase with the house, which was awesome.

Or not.

Apparently, the people who bought the house decided that it was “or not” for them, because Tom and I went to the sale where those very funishings were being sold. And even though we couldn’t afford anything, it was still cool to check everything out and take pictures.  So, enjoy the show!

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Wow!!!  I have about 50 pictures of our treasure hunting from our trip to the U.P. and Northern Wisconsin.  We loved it and we got to do tons of shopping! Enjoy all the photos!

I love these Retro Guest Tuesdays, because we all get to see the great projects everyone has been up to!  The rehab of these shadowboxes was so cool, and I am DYING over the finished product.  Fantastic job, Sara, and I love the color!

OK, so I picked these Shadowboxes up at an antique store recently, and as you can see they needed a ‘leetle’ bit of help! Oddly, I bought these at 2 different antique stores right next to each other. They are almost exactly a matched, mirror image, pair except the one on the right has a little pole holding up the upper shelf. I got them for $10 each, and I *think* I saw my Mom roll her eyes at me (just a little bit) when I picked them up.     I could not help myself though, I had to have them because I knew I could make them ‘all better’. I just  love that ridgy/grooved wood they used on a lot of this type of stuff back then too.

The Shadowbox with the red showing through was in the worst condition. All the white paint along the bottom was flaking off ( I think it was exposed to water at some point because I could see a faint water line) so I had to get off all the flaking paint that I could and kind of sand it down a bit. The other Shadowbox was filthy too, just no chipping paint! Yippee! So, I got them all prepped and ready to go and then I had to decide, hmmmmmmmm – what color should I paint these??? I could not go with boring old white, no way! So I thought about all the wild 50s colors I could paint these: red, pink, turquoise, yellow – nothing seemed right to me. Then I thought of my favorite swivel chair I bought at an Estate Sale, and the funky lime green/Chartreuse color. PERFECT! So I went with Rust-Oleum Key Lime Gloss!

So I painted, and I painted, and I painted, and I painted some more – then I went back to Home Depot for more paint – and paint, paint, paint,  annnnnnnd I had to go back one more time! It actually took 3 cans of paint to get a decent coverage on these shadowboxes. EEPS!  Hello, Home Depot! They must have thought I was tagging my neighborhood in my own special color of wacky green. I am now known at my local HD as “Sara the Key Lime  Tagger”. he  he!  You can see in the next pic why I needed a lot of paint, it seemed like the red kept showing through. Don’t want that!

I also had to paint glass backers for these shadowboxes. These both came originally with a back. One still had the original black painted glass back, so I could only assume the other one had a glass backer as well. One trip to Ace and we came home with our new glass backer! Since one was already painted black, it just needed a touch up over some scratched areas. Here I am getting ready to paint the clear glass.

And, here are the finished black glass backers!

Hooray! I am finished with the painting, and now they just have to finish drying – I only got in a little bit of trouble for painting part of the clothesline green too  ! Oops!

And, here they are – the freshly painted and newly glass backed shadowboxes. Ta-Da!

 Here they are, finally hung on the wall, in all their kitschy glory!