I posted this link to Small Batch Creative over at Zero to Twins for this awesome project of restoring family photographs and having them printed in a book (non-professional photographers could use a service like Blurb — we used them for our wedding photos and the albums turned out beautifully).  But that site is appropriate for the vintage love over here as well — you must check out their painstakingly detailed refurbishing of a vintage work cart into a coffee table. The finished product is ten bazillion times cooler than anything you could buy in a store. I’m particularly impressed by the fact that they had no idea what they were doing at the beginning of the project yet turned out such an amazing piece in the end.

Oh, we have entered the dead zone of thrift store/estate sale/yard sale/rummage sale shopping. The fall, with its plethora of church rummage sales and flurry of estate sales, is behind us; ahead of us lies the long, white, cold stretch of hell known as “winter” in Chicago. Blergh. We went south for the holidays and got back last Friday; I had plans of doing some thrift store shopping this week but all four of us contracted the nastiest cold while in Arkansas and have been hacking and whining about the house instead of going on second-hand adventures. I did stop by the Salvation Army on Devon yesterday, when I dropped a bag of baby clothes off — it was miserable pickings, y’all. It might pick up at the thrift stores in a week or two, because the New Year usually sees people in an unusually productive, organizational mood and the charity thrift stores profit from this burst of industriousness.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to check back during the week next week.

The biggest news in our house this week is that we broke down and bought a new television set. I’ve been watching a 19 inch tube TV, a cast-off of Justin’s, for about 12 years now; our poor nanny, who has little to do but watch TV while the babies are napping, could be found hunched in the only comfortable chair in the living room, squinting at it, on any given day. I know it seems crazy to buy a new TV just for the nanny but really it was for me as well; even though I don’t watch TV that much anymore, it was getting pretty hard for me to see it given the size, my aging eyesight, and the fact that a TV that old isn’t at the top of its game. I have some money in savings from some freelance work that I do for my old corporate employer so the purchase — and choice — was primarily mine, which didn’t sit well with the resident tech pro in the household. He was gunning for a fancy 60 incher, but as soon as I saw it in the store, I knew there was no way I was going to bring that thing into my home. It was so huge I felt like it would somehow be projecting from INSIDE MY BRAIN. We settled for a 50 inch TV that was half the price of the one he wanted to get, and he is grudgingly supportive of my purchase. Of course, finding room for it in the living room meant shuffling even more stuff around, which I have done plenty since the arrival of the babies — all of my beautiful collections are slowly but surely being boxed up and put away. Today, the last of my hats had to be taken down. They’re some of my absolute favorites, so I’m not getting rid of them, but I’ll have to find a safe means of storage for them.

The new TV is sitting on top of what I had previously been using for craft supplies, so I shifted a bunch of stuff around, unearthing, of course, a ton of stuff I had forgotten about. I took photos so you could see (because that’s productive, right? Stopping to take pictures every five minutes?).

I bought these at the Andersonville Neighborhood Sale about six or seven years ago.

Here’s my collection of vintage doorknobs:

Last but not least, I found this little duck just thrown into a drawer:

My apartment is nothing but a big opportunity for multiple New Year’s Resolutions.

Hope your New Year is off to a marvelous start!

This is quickly turning into a blog where all I do is complain about estate sales I went to over the weekend. Forgive me, but I have to discuss, in particular, this one that I stopped at today. Mind you, my Saturdays have become precious time that I cannot afford to squander, what with it being the only day I have to myself, so every estate sale needs to meet a pretty high bar in my mind in order for it to be worth my time…this one did not even come close. I am hoping that some of my Chicago peeps who read this blog occasionally went — it was way out west off of Irving Park, and had primarily lamps. The bottom floor was practically uninhabitable — no one had been living there for maybe 20 years or so. It had horrifyingly disgusting shag carpet in some of the rooms that was almost completely obscured by dirt and grime. Some of the rooms had wallpaper that had been torn off in large chunks and some of the rooms had this weird, stucco-like finishing in a really bright blue with glitter all over — this was the finish on the walls as well as on the ceiling.  I guess the person who lived there might have repaired lamps — there were dozens of them, and lamp parts, and silverware. That’s right, the sale was mostly silverware and lamps. I just got the worst vibe from this place, in addition to feeling really, really dirty upon leaving. I made the mistake of popping into the detached garage on my way back to my car — it opened up onto this cavernous space that had rafters way up high and, sitting in the rafters, were hundreds of garbage bags full of fur fabric scraps. A lot of the scraps were hanging out of the bags and down from the rafters, giving the impression that you were in a slaughterhouse. SHUDDER. The entire experience was like something I would dream in a nightmare after eating sushi too late at night. I am dying to talk to someone else who went who might want to speculate on what the hell was going on there.

Needless to say, I did not purchase anything from this sale.

The only other sale I went to was one done by my beloved Candace of Candace’s Antiques. She primarily does estates on the south side, around Beverly, but was on the north side this morning, which was nice; although I have driven over 25 miles for a Candace sale before, and been damn happy that I did. She has the BEST sales — they’re usually dirty digs, with lots of great stuff piled up in the corners of the basement. And her prices are amazing. PLUS: she is SO NICE. I got to her sale around 10, got about halfway down the hallway and had to leave — it was SO CROWDED. I felt smothered immediately and was afraid I was going to have a panic attack. Because I am a giant, anxious freak, I have to have a clear means of exit from any building I am ever in and there just wasn’t in this place. It was wall to wall, and generally, you can’t even get to the good stuff when a sale is like that, so I went ahead and went to the weird lamp sale, got lunch, and came back. It was STILL crowded, but I had to be getting home, so I chanced it. The basement was huge and chock full of stuff, but it was so packed with people and I was so claustrophobic,  I couldn’t really dig in. About fifteen minutes after I was there a really strong smell of gas started wafting through the house, and people started murmuring about it, and even though a man told me it was just the heaters kicking on, that was about all I could take so I got in line — forty minutes later, I was out the door. Forty minutes! I’ve never been to one of her sales where it was that crowded. I think I would prefer driving to the south side, if it keeps the crowds to a minimum! I have this feeling that there was a lot of other stuff there that I would have loved…in the olden days, pre-twins, I would have gone back on Sunday to check out what was marked half price. Alas, those days are over. I did get this way cool vintage umbrella that I think I’m going to put on Etsy:

I also got a sweet pink and white chenille bedspread in super shape — it’s in the wash, so I’ll have to take photos later. The only other thing I got was this adorable wrapping paper:

Can you believe that we’re almost a week away from Christmas??

Y’all. Have you seen these candlesticks from Anthropologie?

They’re selling them for $399. To whom, I can’t help but wonder? It seems like the kind of person who has that kind of dough for a CANDLESTICK wouldn’t particularly care for this style.

I love this purse I found at the thrift store last week but I can’t figure out what to call it. I finally put it on etsy with the description “embroidered,” in quotation marks, with an explanation of my confusion. It has a tag that says “handmade in Japan” yet it totally looks like faux embroidery.

Hope your week is going well!

The only way I’ve been able to avoid posting tons of pictures of these babies is because Justin and I have been blogging at zerototwins.com — we’ve kept it under construction until now, and we’re hoping that opening it up to other readers will help us post more often. We really want it to serve as the 21st century version of the baby book, but we haven’t been very consistent about posting “firsts,” or weights, or heights, etc. Having readers should keep us on our toes, though, so won’t you join us if you get a chance? We would love to see you over there!

I have hesitantly started selling on Etsy and so far I am willing to call it a success. I think I might like it better than eBay. So far, the buyers I’ve worked with are WAY nicer (and more sane) than some of the folks I’ve run into on eBay. I’m not making a ton of money, and there’s no chance of a huge surprise windfall sale like there was sometimes on eBay, when something was selling via auction — but so far it’s low-stress and low-key. I’m sticking mostly to vintage craft supplies, because they’re easy to box up and send, but have listed some plain old vintage items as well. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve sold so far:

I’ve got these tiny little locks up there right now — I think they’re about 2 inches high — and I totally expected them to sell pretty quickly:

My name on Etsy is Bernice’s Attic. All forms of Pretty.Quirky. were taken, so I had to come up with something else. My granny’s name was Bernice, and tiny attic in her 1940s Arkansas house was a wonder to behold. She had nine kids and kept much of the flotsam and jetsam that she had collected during the 20-some odd years she had children in the house. We would visit in the summers and the highlight of the visit was when I got to go up in the attic. Until I was a teenager, I wasn’t allowed to go alone. The attic featured a gigantic attic fan — like, 6 or 7 feet in diameter — that was all blades, no screening mechanism. Plus, there were many places in the flooring where a person could fall right through. These dangers only added to the mystery and excitement, as far as I was concerned. SO much fun to go through all of the boxes and bags. My favorites were the clothes — prom and party dresses from the 1950s and 1960s…heaven. So that’s where the inspiration for my Etsy name came from.

If you get a chance, take a look and let me know what you think. It’s a paltry selection right now but am working on getting some more stuff listed before Christmas.

I found these at an estate sale last weekend:

d

I just got back from a round of the thrift stores, where everything was half-price. I went to three of them and got the babies three giant bags full of clothes. Still haven’t had to purchase much new for them! But I didn’t find any fun vintage items…I’m sure pickers had already cleared the shelves of anything good by the time I got there at nine or ten.

Hope your Thanksgiving was wonderful!

You guys, I had a huge yard sale in August. I mean HUGE. Our neighborhood does a sale every summer and for about a year now I’ve been planning on getting rid of a ton of stuff at it. Our storage space and garage were full of boxes left over from both the Arkansas booth and the last Vintage Bazaar I sold at, including a ton of stuff that never even made it to the shelves at either place. So over the span of about two months, I hauled it all down to the garage, priced it at next to nothing, and put it out bright and early that morning. We had a few hitches: for the first time, we sold out back (for this particular sale, almost everyone sells in front of the buildings) because a few people from our building were participating and there just wasn’t room up front. My downstairs neighbors, who have four kids, set up on the paved patio and I used the deck: this meant that shoppers hit her stuff before even seeing mine, and she had all baby stuff, so I lost a lot of people because they couldn’t see that there were vintage items farther in the yard. So that sucked. We rallied, made some signs, and tried to pull in all the shoppers we could…until about 1, when it down poured rain like Jesus was mad at us. Serious, crazy rain. We packed everything up, I sold a bunch of stuff for $5 to some lucky woman who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and then I made five trips to the Salvation Army and dumped all the stuff off. I didn’t even let myself look at what I was donating because I knew I would be tempted to keep it. Looking back now I am cringing at the thought of what I gave away, but I just can’t tell you how claustrophobic our apartment has gotten since our two additions have arrived…it just had to go.

Which is to say that I have been working really hard at not bringing more stuff into the apartment. I think I’m tons better than I used to be, but I still find myself buying the odd item that I really have no room for and that I’m not all that crazy about. For example, I’ve been accidentally collecting these cheesy 1960s busts lately.

My peeps, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter. Having newborns in Chicago in the wintertime is not a picnic, let me tell you. Prior to their birth, I of course thought I would be sashaying off to this thrift store and that estate sale all during my maternity leave but THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN. First of all, it’s really hard to get infant twins down three flights of stairs that are covered in six inches of snow. Secondly, sleep schedules are doubly important with two babies so I have pretty much been a prisoner in my own home in an effort to make sure we had a routine and were sticking to it. Despite keeping me locked away from my precious vintage finds, that plan has really paid off — Emmeline has been sleeping through the night (starting at 7 pm and sleeping until her brother wakes her up around 6 am) for about a month now and Jack is on his way. He’s our early riser, getting up usually sometime between 4:30 and 5:30, but yesterday morning he slept until 6 am, so we’re making progress.

But you didn’t come here to read about babies! I never wanted to be one of those people who had kids and that’s all they could ever talk about. It’s hard, though, when your entire day consists of nothing but babies. So I’m going to try my best to keep the focus of Pretty Quirky on vintage finds and off of babies…I have another outlet for that (more on that later).

My amazing husband and I have worked out a deal on weekends: he takes Saturdays with the babies, and I take Sundays. So on Saturday, I am free to go yard saling to my heart’s desire. That hasn’t been much of a deal until the last weekend or so because, of course, Chicago hasn’t really warmed up until now (and even now they’re threatening cold weather returning next week. BOOOOOO.). Yesterday I had a lovely day, shopping at a few rummage sales and then hitting a neighborhood sale. It felt like a real return to normalcy, and I’m looking forward to my Saturdays to come. Of course, right now I have no plans to re-sell things, so that makes it a little more boring for me. I didn’t realize how much fun it was to find something for a great price that I knew I could sell in either my booth or one of the Vintage Bazaars. Plus, we’re contemplating a move closer to our family, so I am probably going to have a big, blow-out yard sale and try and de-clutter, so the last thing I need is to be bringing home a lot of stuff in the meantime…but you know I can’t help myself.

I am, of course, finding a lot of baby stuff out there (why does anyone buy anything new for babies??) but won’t bore you with that stuff here. Instead, Justin and I are in the process of taking our baby blog live — you should be able to see it soon here. I’ll keep all baby stuff there so that this doesn’t totally turn into a mommy blog.

I didn’t find anything earth shattering yesterday, but did get a few fun finds:

Hope to post new finds soon! If you’re still following the blog, thanks for sticking through the past five months with no updates…I appreciate it!