OKAY! No more spending starting NOW...

Wait! Okay maybe after I this:

Southwestern style backpack from Santokivintage. Price $199

I've been into vintage rug/tapestry purse lately of the IKAT Kilim style ever since I found this one from Dusty Rose.

And I really love bonheur's shop on Etsy. She's made some beautiful pieces over the years.

New Project LIGHT TENT

As I've mentioned before, I do sell vintage items on Etsy. I first found out about this website in 2009. I can't even remember how but I get the feeling that I might have been thinking a lot about starting a shop there before last winter. In any event, I started selling in late February of this year. I had a different shop that I do now and it was more for my handmade items than for things of a vintage nature. It didn't go well for me and truth be told I don't think I would like doing it. I kept imagining scenarios where I would get maybe 10 orders (which I never did of course but just humor me) and then have to make the same thing over and over again! Talk about boring! So I guess I like the design side of business more than the putting-things-together side. This doesn't count for the first few times though. I could make something I design probably four times tops. I think efficiency in design is important.

Selling vintage is a much more pleasant experience for me. And I have a lot of confidence in my future as a seller of vintage things. I've never had a ton of confidence in my design capabilities. I don't tend to do well with designing mass marketable things. I think I may be a good artist. I think I have very eccentric tastes so when I design something it might not be attractive or marketable objectively but it might be pretty to me.

So anyway, I've been thinking of a way to make it easier for me to work and take pictures at any time I want. I've been thinking about light boxes a lot lately. I would think having one would make it so convenient to photograph anything I sell. So it wouldn't matter if it were cloudy, I would have my light box, or light tent (which would be way better).
    Searching for fabric I ran across some rip-stop nylon which is supposed to be a good diffusive material that is also heat resistant. I have some metal poles around the apartment from my boyfriends abandoned rep-rap that I might be able to use for the support. So the only thing left to figure out now is how to make it collapsible because space is precious in a studio apartment shared by two people.

Why does everything I do HAVE to be so complicated?!

How shopping for VINTAGE clothing can be REALLY hard.

photo courtesy of creative commons

    I sell vintage clothing on Etsy. The things that can be seen in my shop Say It Ain't Sold! Vintage, are acquired from a variety of sources, and as unremarkable as this might sound, The Salvation Army, is one of them. So I was in there today on a whim because I was looking for some cheap pierced earrings that hopefully had glued on post backs which could be removed. I needed them as replacements for screwbacks for some adorable unsigned Merriam Haskell earrings I found on Etsy.

     I didn't find what I was looking for so I began hunting for some things for the shop. About half an hour into my search I began to get frustrated and I almost gave up. I know I can't be alone in having
the problem I was having. This problem should  provoke many amateur vintage sellers, the problem being: Is what you are buying to sell really vintage?
    Let's face it, clothing that you can buy out of a store or online, clothing, that was manufactured within the last two years can be really cheap. So I'd like to have the piece of mind to know that when I'm asking a premium for something that can be found at any store it's because it's vintage (though the ethics of buying pre-owned clothing period is a conundrum which I'm sure many people are aware of and is something that I might discuss in a later post). So when I'm hunting for authentic vintage clothing I sometimes find it difficult to determine if what I am looking at is vintage at all.
    If you have ever been in a big box place like the Salvation Army you know that they can be overwhelming in terms of the amount of crap I mean things that are there. Though I will say I've never been to any Salvation Army outside of the Chicagoland area (they have them all over the world) so I am only familiar with the starkly lit, the Jesus-Bop, the gray speckled white vinyl floors, and uninspiring metal display racks crammed with clothing, that I have seen at the locations in Chicago.
Perhaps it would be cheating to ask if they could have a department, if you will, for only vintage things? That way it would take the guesswork out of digging!

Survey Results for Buying Vintage!

Buying Vintage Survey

Survey results imminent I promise!

So it's taken me an embarrassingly long amount of time to publish these results. I've got them all up on a spreadsheet and nicely sorted out into graphs and things. Now I've got to figure out a way to get them on here.

Dreams

Sometimes my dreams are so real, or they correlate so closely to my desires, that I have to confirm whether the event in the dream actually occurred. For example, I dreamt last night that one of my mom's prints, that I currently have listed in my shop (which my mom really wants me to sell) acquired a heart (for sellers on Etsy this is good because the garnering of these means that someone likes your item and wants to remember). When I looked in my Etsy shop this morning there is no such thing. It kind of scares me sometimes because these aren't outlandish phenomenons they are subtle, and believable.

Sometimes I even dream about past events or I dream about about the aftermath of embarrassing events. I remember I used to read a lot of epic novels in high school. I don't remember my professor ever saying anything about it to me. In a dream my dream teacher said something really incisive and was so spot on as to what I thought he might have been thinking about my underlying reasons for reading all of those books.