Shop Preview: Fall Fling

Coming to the shop this week ....warm jackets, fancy fall dresses and more:













Follow us on Twitter to know exactly when we post them!

Estate Sale Finds: Foldaway Paper Fan

I'm always a fan of old packaging, and got a kick out of the command printed on the box that this lovely paper fan came in:



Keep cool and be gay!

I know that gay had a different connotation back in the day, but I still think it is a funny admonition from a fan - the keeping cool part I can understand, but the command to go forth and be happy with nothing more than a small fan suggests powerful things from this little paper treasure.

Estate Sale Finds: Pattern Frenzy

I've been really interested in the trend of mixing a lot of prints and patterns lately, so I was delighted to find a number of shirts at an estate sale last week that push the boundaries of colors/patterns that I might normally wear.


I already had some fun mixing a bright floral blouse with a simple high waisted black and white striped skirt, and am interested to experiment with some of the other wild patterns in those blouses.



You can check out some outfit inspiration I've been pinning over at Pinterest - lots of bold patterns and bright colors.

Animal Head Art: New AHV Mascots

I always love picking up beautiful old portraits of discarded ancestors at estate sales or flea markets and have been plotting a few crafts with them so that they aren't relegated to the shoebox where I keep them currently.

I'm no photoshop expert, but I know my way around the program well enough to have a little fun. These are some new mascots I created for the shop and blog from some photos I picked up in Detroit a few weeks back. I think these two would have made quite a pair:

Shop Preview: Feathers, sailors and more

We've been (finally) putting some new stuff in the shop, and you can expect to see some of these gems this week!

There are some feathers....





Some sailor backs:





And a few other coats, shirts and more





Follow us on twitter to know exactly when we list em.

Friday Estate Find: Vintage Pink Bathroom Scale

I've said it before, but one of my favorite things about estate sales is getting to check out the interior of someone else's house and get a sense for how they lived and what their style was. Some people you feel like you would have liked alot, based soley on their choice of wallpaper and couches.

This week I walked into a pretty nondescript estate sale. Nothing in the house would have made you suspect that there was anything but a normal, slightly boring, neutral color loving couple that lived there. That is, until I stepped into the upstairs bathrooom and was immediately overwhelmed by the amount of pink that had been amassed in such a small tiled space. It looked like Barbie had been throwing a Pepto Bismol party. Pink, pink, pink from floor to ceiling.

Suddenly my idea of the couple that had lived there changed. Maybe the husband had been insistent on a neutral color palatte throughout the house, despite living there through more colorful decades like the 70s. I imagined the woman, muttering under her breath things like "so you think pink should just be an "accent" color, do you?" as she carefully placed the pink shag bathmat underneath the pink porcelain toilet bowl.



The one thing I salvaged from the place was this pink scale for our neutral gray and white bathroom. I swear, husband, its just an accent piece.

DIY: Vintage Tins as Fridge Magnets

Another cute way to repurpose vintage tins - turn them into magnets and stick them on the fridge to hold pencils or other doodads:


Full tutorial to be found at Creature Comforts.