A Tough Decision and More House Stuff

I’ve made a tough decision and have decided to sell my Vintage at Goodwood tickets. I so wanted to go, but decided that finishing the new house should come first and having already had an amazing holiday to New York this year and lots of mini breaks, I couldn’t really justify spending more money enjoying myself. They’re worth £300 with their camping passes and I have just sold them on Ebay for £140, which can go towards getting my front garden turned into a parking spot. Originally I had intended the front to be a little courtyard garden, but with visitor’s parking scarce I’ve decided to have the ground made ok for a car and some stones put down, with an old sleeper acting as a kerb/separator between the parking spot and a couple of vintage Belfast sinks.

Lily's Had Her Hair Cut

 I’m also in the process of putting slate down around my shed and in some of the flower beds to make them look a bit neater. All the untidy woodchip was driving me mad and the previous owners had left me eight big bags of slate behind the shed. I also desperately want a vintage caravan for the back garden and I definitely have the space, but how to get one in when you’re surrounded by houses and gardens? Most people would give up at this point but my eccentric family said ‘no problem, just get a crane to drop it in’, so in a year or so, a crane it will be. I’d eventually love one like the one below, but will need to be looking for a reasonably priced one that needs some TLC. After all, it doesn’t need to be road worthy, since it will be going nowhere once it’s plonked into my back garden. There’s a lovely old caravan sat on a driveway near my uncles house and I’m very tempted to pop a note through the door suggesting they sell it to me, lol.

Last weekend I had a stall at the monthly Bicycle Basket Bazaar. We set up outside All Saints Church in Northampton and it was a lovely venue with lots of customers. The nice weather was a bonus too, with us all watching the sky for signs of any dark clouds. Everyone commented on how lovely my stall looked, but unfortunately I’d forgotten my camera. This neon swimming costume was hung across my bike’s handle bars. It has a lovely low back, buttons on the shoulders, formed chest and a little skirt. I love it.

I’ve also been spending a bit of time organising the house and have had my very sweet Hetty Hoover arrive.

My bedside table and Elvis Teddy Bear. He even plays 'Let Me Be Your Teddy Bear'

Scarves, bangles and pretty china plates loaded with earrings

A big thank you for all your lovely message on my Goodwood post because....I WON, and I’m sure it’s all because of the good vibes you sent in your messages, lol. I’m not only excited because I’ve won, but because my entry wasn’t simply ‘pulled out of a hat’, it was chosen by Vintage at Goodwood organiser Wayne Hemingway. So one of my bestests, Faye, and I are off to Goodwood from the 13th until the 15th. Accommodation wasn’t included in the prize and I was a bit worried that everywhere nearby was going to be booked up, but I managed to book us into a lovely B&B nearby. The rooms and gardens look lovely, and it didn’t break the bank.

After inviting Faye, the first thing she said was ‘Oh my God, what am I going to wear?’. My answer? ‘I really wouldn’t worry about it because everyone’s going to be so ridiculously cool and vintagesque that we’re going to look totally ordinary anyway’. So that’s that sorted. I’m going to be working hard carbooting and ebaying so that I can buy lots of lovely things while I’m there, and the list of things needed for the new house may have to temporarily go on hold. I think it’s highly likely that I’ll be coming back with something like this, or this.

Vintage at Goodwood..owww I want to go

I've recently entered a competition on the B&Q website to win tickets for Vintage at Goodwood; Celebrating 5 Decades of British Cool. It looks a-mazing, but although the tickets are pretty bargainous for who and what is going to be there, I still can't justify the money. Of course if I were to win the tickets then the money for a hotel and travel would be totally justifiable! There are some really good entries on there, much better than mine, so I'm not holding out much hope, but hey you've got to be in it to win it.

Below is my entry, along with the pics I submitted.

Vintage Loveliness

For as long as I can remember I have been ‘rescuing’ unloved vintage furniture and miscellaneous from carboot sales, tips shops and Freecycle and squirreling it all away in various family members lofts and garages until I had my own home. Well as of last week I finally have my own home, and every corner of it is filled with vintage loveliness! I’ve mixed the old with the new to create a functional yet, hopefully, interesting home.

One thing that I’ve always struggled with is how to display my many vintage, retro and just plain modern items. Having Aspergers (a form of autism) means that I crave order and organisation, but certainly not at the cost of style. Over the years I’ve found ways to mix my love of vintage with functionality; My jewellery is kept in a vintage key cabinet, shoes in an old wire gym-shoe unit, craft items in a 50s kitchen utility cabinet, complete with a pull out table, and a old travel trunk serves as my coffee table. A small portion of my vintage china collection is kept in a 50’s china cabinet, with my vintage sewing box sitting close by, and a collection of tins and vintage children’s annuals nestling next to the modern(DVDs), on made to measure book shelves. But my favourite, my absolute favourite, has to be my 50s light up cocktail cabinet, where on opening, multicoloured shot , lemonade and Babycham glasses are illuminated and ice is ready to be dispensed from the obligatory pineapple ice bucket. Del Boy would be proud

On With The To Do List

Today I took advantage of the weather and decided that I’d attempt to get a few more things ticked off my To Do List by painting some furniture in the garden. The vintage folding shelves my mum bought for me from a carboot sale last week were transformed with a few coats of blossom white paint and will come in very handy for the next Bicycle Basket Bazaar, which this month (31st) is being held on the piazza outside All Saints Church in Northampton, 12 until 4pm.

I also painted my small hall table, which turned out to be a minor disaster, with me smashing my new lamp while trying to wrestle the table into the garden and then a big fat grasshopper landing on the wet table, leaving a nice dent in my paintwork.

My step dad also came round to plant the many varieties of perennials him and my mum had bought for me and he also put my bag rails up, meaning I could unpack another two boxes. More ticked off the To Do List.

My next task is to Ebay/carboot/Bicycle Bazaar to fund a fireplace for my living room and some kitchen shelves to display my vintage tins and general kitchenalia. The picture below is of something I picked up at my local carboot sale and is something I’ve never seen before; a chamois glove cleaning set, complete with instructions. I think I’ll be taking this along to the Bicycle Bazaar, along with some other recent vintage finds.

On Thursday I’m off to the Agatha Christie festival in Harrogate with my Nan. I’m looking forward to relaxing in the hotel with Miss Marple, probably The Thirteen Problems, and enjoying some delicious meals and cream teas. I’ll try and take lots of pics, and when I return I am most definitely on Fat Club i.e. Weight Watchers, before my little legs can no longer carry me.

Excuse the Mammoth Blog.

I’ve finally, finally moved house! Watching the removal men unloading my worldly goods, which I’ve had in storage for 6 weeks, I was amazed at just how much stuff I actually have. ‘Where do you want the bureau?’ they shouted. ‘It’s NOT a bureau, it’s a 1950s cocktail cabinet!’. So needless to say, almost 2 weeks after my stuff was shipped in, I’m still unpacking, aghhh. Fortunately I’d over prepared and booked 4 weeks off work.

I still have a mass of stuff still sitting below the stairs and my spare room/craft room looks like a grizzly bear’s been in and rifled through everything. My progress in the spare room has been majorly hampered by the fact that I have, for the second time in a year, lost the screws to the spare bed. Hmm, as I told the woman at Ikea when I went to order more parts, ‘I’ve put them in a Tupperware container with a green lid, somewhere so safe I can’t find them’.

When my spare room does start to take some sort of shape I have the most amazingly amazing 1950s kitchen utility cabinet that I got from a lovely lady on Freecycle who was clearing out her late Uncle’s house. When the usual 40 per day emails from Freecycle popped into my Inbox I huffed and puffed and cursed the moderators for not removing me from the mailing list like I’d asked... and then, oh dear god, a 50s utility kitchen cabinet. I replied to the email right away hoping that I would be the first to reply, and was devastated when the lady kindly replied that I was the second person to respond and that since then she’d been inundated with people wanting to take it off her hands. I was even more devastated when she managed to upload a picture of the cabinet to the site and it was beautiful. Anyway, knowing how Freecycle works and knowing that the cabinet could only be collected at certain times on certain days, I told the lady how keen I was on the cabinet and being the second in line for the cabinet, not to hesitate in contacting me if it somehow became available. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the first emailer couldn’t collect, the lady liked my email address (retrodollybird) and knew that the cabinet would be cherished by me, I sent my mum and cousin to collect the cabinet as I had to be at the new house for the removal men and assumed the cabinet would be light like the majority of their kind. The cabinet turned out to be very tall and very heavy, and my excellent stepdad and his brother had to finish work early and rush over to put it on their roof rack, while being told by my mum and I, ‘It was too good to miss!’. Despite my cousin being very anti-vintage, he actually loves the cabinet and keeps checking on it like it’s a new baby every time he visits.

Talking of new babies, I would like to announce the arrival of Lily Young, a 2 year old black Scottie dog weighting 15.9 lbs. She may be 2, but she’s my new baby and although bought rather than rescued, she is as the vet put it, basically a rescue dog. She’s a bit like my Mum’s Scottie Jack. Totally unsocialised except for dogs, scared yet interested in everything, only part toilet trained, not lead trained and not used to regular meal times or dog food. The vet seemed to think she was probably kept by a breeder for breeding and for whatever reason, sold onto her next owner, and then to me; the woman I bought her from being unable to cope with training a 2 year old who you’d expect to be trained. Luckily, suspicious of her low price, I bought lily with open eyes and expected her to need as much work as Jack. Fortunately she doesn’t, just the basics that a new puppy would, and in return she is the most loving, faithful and sweetest baby girl ever. She’s also very stubborn and insists that since I can open the drawers under my bed, she will find a way to do it too.

Busy busy

 I've had a busy weekend putting some of my advertising mug collection on Ebay and doing two carboot sales before my house move tomorrow (well technically Monday as I’m decorating first). Although I was meant to be selling at the carboot sales rather than buying, I abandoned my aunt for a bit to have a wander around and below are a few pics of my finds, including an enormous oriental fan with a hand painted design. I love oriental artwork and have a beautiful picture of birds in a blossom tree which I picked up from a booter a few years ago and that will be taking pride of place in my bedroom again once the move is complete. I have the spare bedroom/craft room in mind to display the fan.

Excuse the terrible photos. I just couldn't get a light/unblurred pic.

Above is a couple of my Cath K purchases, along with some recycling shop buys and my new milk bottle holder. I can't bear the usual boring ones.

Today my Mum and I headed to Bicester Village to the Cath Kidston outlet. I bought a coin purse as part of my friends birthday box and also bought one for myself to keep my carboot sale change in. I was meant to be looking for bits and pieces for the house but nothing caught my eye and I ended up buying a lovely big bag in the cowboy print and a carrier bag holder which I’ll use at the next Bicycle Bazaar to tame my usually unruly load of carrier bags.

Tommorrow is a busy day as I not only get my house keys, but also have a hospital appointment to be tested for a hereditary breast cancer gene. After that I’m off to Evesham to pick up six Belfast sinks that I’ve just bought on Ebay for my new garden and on Thursday a pair of Laura Ashley Hydrangea curtains will be arriving and I’ll be measuring and negotiating with my Mum as to whether I can steal her Laura Ashley curtains in the living room for my new house (if they fit!) and she can have the new Hydrangea ones. I’m hoping my Mum’s will fit my French doors in the new house as I not only love the print, but managed to pick up a matching blind to fit the small window in the living room at a carboot sale last week for a bargainous £6. I In fact I realised this week that I’m getting quite good at pretending to be blasé about items at carboots, when really I spy them from a distance and have to fight the urge to run run run, grab the item and say I’ll have it before even asking the price.

These Hotel Chocolate chocolates are exact copies of vintage buttons and I love them. My friends/famnily know me so well since I've now had two boxes of them as gifts. Yum yum.

'How you doin'?'

I arrived back in England on Friday after my week long New York trip and have taken so long to blog as I’m still adjusting to the time difference, have caught a horrid cold off some diseased person on the plane and took so many pictures while I was there that it’s taken me two days to attempt to get them into some sort of order. As my cousin said, ‘you have way too many pictures on your Facebook. I mean, once you’ve seen one Manhattan skyline you’ve seen them all’.

So, New York was amazing. We had a strict itinerary with as much as possible packed in and we did all the main touristy stuff; The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Central Park, Top of The Rock (70th floor of The Rockefeller Building), The Empire State Building, Times Square etc. We also fitted in lots of routes on the open top bus tours, which I love, mainly because I can see everything from high up without having to walk miles in the heat. I bought a few bits and bobs from the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market, which was disappointingly small, and also went to the famous Magnolia bakery credited with the ‘cupcake revival’. I left with two cupcakes, including the Sex in the City 'Carrie' cake and a ridiculously expensive 50s style apron. We also did an amazing food tour in Greenwich Village, which was an artsy kind of place back in the day, but is now an artsy ‘you can only live here if you have a few million lying around’ kind of place. It was much less touristy than any of the other places we’d been, and not only was the food delish, but I got to hear the phrases I’d been waiting for all week; ‘How you doin’?’, ‘Eh, ya tellin’ me’, ‘Eh, forget about it’. I was overjoyed!

Purchases from the Flea Market: Tooled leather bag, 70s scrapbook, Coca Cola Memorabilia, Camcraft book and a Jewellery box.

One of the strangest places we went to was The American Girl Place. It was a must after me seeing it on TV a few years ago and is the most surreal/scary place ever! Basically it’s a doll shop, but so much more. They sell a collection of dolls, all of which come with basic clothes and accessories, and the rest of the three/four storey building is taken up with extra clothes, shoes and accessories for EVERY occasion. I really do mean Every occasion, whether it be horse riding, cheerleading, camping, going to the salon, recovering after an injury or camping. You can even buy matching outfits for your little girl and their doll (Terrifying).

If all of that wasn’t strange enough we went to the next floor and found Mums and Daughters queuing for the Doll Salon, where about eight dolls at a time were sat in salon chairs having their nylon tresses pulled and poked into French plaits, bunches, buns etc for about $20 upwards. They could even have their ears pierced! As I turned away amazed, I accidentally stumbled into ‘The Doll Hospital’ where an extremely concerned Mum and Daughter were checking ‘Lanie’ in to have her head put back on. After a bit of research back at the hotel (The American Girl Place had had a profound effect on me by then) I found that the doll would leave the ‘hospital’ complete with hospital gown and wrist tag, and that the doll wheelchair was a popular purchase for the doll’s recuperation at home. We left after half an hour, confused, amazed, but also a little bit sold on this whole surreal world. I mean, how could you fail to be impressed by a place that has ‘doll stands’ in each restroom?

My cousin demonstrating the doll wheelchair.

 I got carried away with New York kitsch/tacky souvenirs.

I bought these before I even stepped on the plane. How could I resist Cath Kidston duty free?