No Pattern Required

Thanks to Sara for this great guest post.  Gotta give the love to Goodwill!

OK, I admit I have been obsessing over Goodwill lately. There are 3 Goodwills really close by my house, and it seems like I am ALWAYS going in there and trying to find a new kitschy goody. And Sale Day Saturdays, well just try to keep me away!   

My first find was a 50s/60s magazine rack. As you can see, I already have it loaded up with my old Ladies Home Journals from the 1950s. I love the look of these old magazine racks, and there are SO many different varieties. They are really useful too – especially if you have a bunch of old Ladies Home Journals laying around! This rack was $3.99.

Next up, a FAB pair of Mermaids Mike found for me! I am totally in love with ceramic mermaids and fish from the 50s/60s. If I can find them cheap I will definitely pick them up. I *somehow* managed to walk right by these mermaids, and then Mike walks up to me with them in his hand – I felt like a dork! But, I was so glad he had spotted them. Maybe it was the madness of Sale Day Saturday that caused me to miss them – who knows. Anyway, since it was sale day, the mermaids were only $2.50 for the pair.

Next up is a cool McCoy Pot my Mom actually bought. I know McCoy is pretty collectible, so we definitely thought $9.99 was a fair price for this Pot. It is really big, about 10 inches tall, and it is a cool turquoise green color. I love the design on the pot too.

I found these really cool 1960s kitchen towels for 60 cents each. They seriously do not look like they have ever been used or washed. How could I pass these up???

And, lastly, the funky and kitschy wall art I found. I know it looks like a tile mosaic, but it is actually one big giant piece of chalkware. It is SOOOOO heavy too – it probably weighs 15 lbs, maybe more. I thought it was really cool. It kind of reminds me of New Orleans/Mardi Gras. This was purchased on Sale Day Saturday for $4!

Has anyone else gotten the Goodwill bug – Ruth, Sable? Does anyone have any great finds they would like to share with the rest of us. We all would love to hear about it.

Check out the fabulous new dishes!!  Tom and I got these from my parents for our anniversary which is coming up on Thanksgiving Day.

They say on the bottom: Mikasa Elite Narumi Calibou. From what I can find out, this is from the time when Mikasa was primarily an importer.  This pattern was produced by the Narumi company in Japan and imported into the United States in the 1960′s.   My parents picked up this set for $25 at a flea market this summer.  My mom said she bought it for two reasons, the first because it is blue, but the second reason was that she couldn’t walk away from the salt and pepper shakers.  I can’t blame her, they are pretty fabulous and I am very excited about the gift.  They aren’t exactly the same blue as my kitchen, but I still LOVE them and the pattern. Oh, and my parents!

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!

Here is some great furniture, thanks to reader Carolyn for finding this!  This little display stand is amazing, and I adore the color.  And $30!  Carolyn said the seller would be willing to ship, too, so if this is your dream piece, go for it!

The seller also has this great telephone stand with a lamp.  So very cute!

Thanks for the head’s up, Carolyn!

Here is my most recent thrifting find.  Two fabulous vintage hand-blown glass birds from Murano, Italy.  They are about a foot tall, and are matching but not identical. I picked these up while I was at Goodwill, for a surprising $6 for the pair.  Amazing. 

Unfortunatly, this is another thing Tom and I don’t agree on. He doesn’t like the birds, but I love them. I think they look great on the new table in the living room, the gold sparkles inside the perches they sit on looks really good with the other accent pieces.

Tom thinks they look ok on the table, but he says he could think of better things to go there.  Right now, they are on the table, so we will see what happens.  Marriage is all about compromise, right?  Maybe the awesome birds will have to be listed online for some lucky collector in the future. 

Right now, they are happily perched in our living room.

Full-sized Glass Birds

Close-up Of Bird Face

In Their Temporary Home In The Living Room

I got an email from Andrea S. the other day with these great pictures of her vintage stereo cabinet. Andrea says:

I got this for a whopping $15 at a garage sale last summer – it is in beautiful condition, whoever owned it cared for it well.  The colour of the wood looks very similar to your table, and the shape of the legs is very similar too.

*Andrea is speaking of this table Tom and I recently found at an estate sale.

Sweet find, Andrea!  I love it!

Happy Monday morning, all!

Hubs and I had a crazy weekend. We planned way too many activites, as usual, and only got a portion of stuff done from a huge to-do list.  If you saw yesterday’s post, we did get our road trip in, which was really nice since we hadn’t done that in a long time.  And I got a ton of great pictures, which I put up on Flickr.

But this morning I realized that I hadn’t posted a picture of our new floor lamp yet!  You are going to have to excuse my ignorance on this one, since I haven’t had a lot of time to do research, so I don’t know who the maker is on this lamp or the time period.  But I knew it totally went with our room.  This is one of the few times I insisted that Hubs buy something, even if he wasn’t too sure about it. But I knew I wanted this lamp as soon as we walked into the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. And I refused to leave the store without it.

But Hubs was right to have some reservations. Not on the look of the lamp, which he loves, but that it is in some disrepair. One of the arms, the longest one in the back, is loose with no real way of tightening it. AND two out of the three lamps don’t have bulbs in them, because where the lightbulb screws in is so corroded that the threads are stripped. Which is a huge bummer.  But one works, which is about as much light as we had before here, so we aren’t complaining.  Now all we need is to figure out how to fix it ourselves, or where to take it to get it fixed.

So, if anyone knows the manufactorer of this light, feel free to leave it in the comments.  Oh, and if anyone could recommend a good book on identifiying vintage lighting, let me know.  I need to start doing more research!

So, I finally got it to work.  Here is a slideshow of most of the thrifting finds from last weekend.  Hubs and I are off to the concrete dinosaur park in Ossineke today.  We are stopping in Tawas City to do some thrifting as well, so expect lots of great pics tomorrow!

More great vintage dresses for me to show off today.  This dress I bought at the local Salvation army for $1.99. It isn’t the correct style for my body type, but I just loved the pattern of the fabric, so I thought I could make an exception. Just this once. 

I almost made an exception for a vintage silk blouse that I saw when I bought this dress.  It had the most amazing tulip print on it, and the collar and 3/4 length sleeves were edged in kelly green.  I loved it, but it looked like someone spilled something red on the right front side.  The stain was faded, like someone had tried to get it out and failed, so that stopped me from buying it. Which sucks, because it was the most amazing fabric.  I really want an excuse to go back and buy it, so if anyone has any suggestions on how to reuse it or a foolproof stain removal trick, let me know.  I was thinking maybe a pillow or something. What do you think?

In any case, here is a close-up of the neckline of the dress I did get.  I love the pleats.  Once again, this is a hand sewn dress, no commercial tags in sight.  There are a bunch of vintage commercial dresses from the 40s to the 70s at the Salvation Army, but they are so tiny!  I would never fit into one of those!  Luckily, it seems that there were plenty of people around here to had to make their own clothes, and I am totally fine with buying handmade items.

By the way, these dresses are all photographed on our three season porch, which is finally warm enough to use.  It has a heater on it for when it gets cold, but I don’t like to run it too often because it is old and probably an energy sucker. 

It turns out that the white brick wall that is shared with the kitchen is perfect for taking pictures of dresses and linens during a sunny day.

Anyway, this last dress is so pretty, another one I couldn’t resist.  Bought at the Salvation army for $2.99, I consider this to be a steal. It is so close to fitting. I am a little heavy in the top department, so the buttons strain a little when I put it on. Since it is summer and I will be riding my bike soon, I took a chance and bought it will the hopes of fitting into it by July.

So, I hope you liked the dresses. I have one more that I am hoarding for right now because  it is far too big, and I actually am going to try to cut it down to my size.  We will see how that goes!

This post was submitted to Vintage Thingie Thursdays by the Colorado Lady!  Check out everyone else’s vintage goodness…