I have entitled this post “Awesome Orange Van” because on my way to work this morning I passed an awesome orange van and took pictures of it. It looked like a nice place to wake up, maybe open the windows and have a cup of coffee.
Also, a couple coffee tins in the etsy shop this week, just $5 each:
Have a great weekend!
I’m not exactly in a position to buy anything right now, but if I were, it would be cheap. Here are a few things I want:
Because I am, right?
I love Qantas posters. I also admire the travel industry until approximately the 1970’s for pretty much eschewing all sensible means of advertising - that is, actual photographs of the advertised destinations - in favor of abstract illustrations by E. McKnight Kauffer, Jean Carlu, and David Klein, among others. Or maybe it’s just that only these were interesting enough to survive.
These rugs are apparently handmade from recycled soda bottles. And I need an outdoor rug.
Okay, so these *aren’t* cheap. But I do want them. I’m going to make a confession here: my drinking glasses are from Ikea. I said it.
And I’ve added some more cheap things to the store:
Jiffy Chest recipe box, circa 1939: $6
Large Couroc tray: $10
So, last night I launched my adorable new storefront on etsy.com, and though it only has five little treasures in there so far, I have a lot more stuff I’ll be adding in the coming days and weeks. Here are a few things I’ve got in there at the moment:
A Harlequin individual salad bowl in yellow, $25
Vintage Fiestaware salt and pepper shakers, $15/set.
Glass syrup dispenser, $10.
A cute little vintage tin for storing unimportant things, $8.
Tell your friends! Buy things! Tell your friends to buy things!
A few days early, here’s a new desktop calendar for June (1600×1200):
Click to see full image, right-click that to download. I’m going to be adding more sizes too, before June actually starts. Here are a few more resolutions:
Update: this wallpaper has been featured today on Smashing Magazine, including many more resolutions and sans-calendar versions.
I stopped by this madness this morning, and it was totally worth it. Things vary wildly in price, from $1 dishes and coffee cans to $1500 rugs to $7000 signs, but the stuff was incredible.
For just $7500, you can own a piece of Hollywood history:
Plenty of other whatnot:
I bought these little coffee tins.
Many neon signs, in the $5000 - $7500 range
I forgot to ask how much this was, but isn't it lovely?
Sale goes on until noon at Bergamot Station. Cash only, though I’m guessing you can’t take enough out at the ATM to cover that Brown Derby sign.
A quick note for those in the Los Angeles area - Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica is having a clearance sale this Wednesday morning from 8-noon, reportedly with vintage dishes, plus “a mountain of vintage furniture, collectibles, antiques, books, lighting, old signs, advertising, vintage appliances, and neon signs.”
Read about it here (thanks, jake).
Spotted at Bible Tablernacle thrift store, on Indiana and Lincoln in Venice.
An entire tub of yarn with awesome vintage labels.
An organ for $15. A bargain at twice the price.
Awesome.
This thrift store has a LOT of cool-looking books.
A McDowell & Craig steel tanker desk … for $40(?!).
And the best part …
Thirty National Geographic books, many with great cover art.
This box was filled with old National Geographic books with incredible covers. Some of my favorites:
I wanted them so badly that only now do I realize I paid way too much for them. I also found this on the sidewalk:
It clearly needs a good cleaning and a little work, but still, a great find for free.
It’s been a while. There’s been a lot of upheaval around here lately, but I’ve learned that without some extracurricular activities like ye olde blogge here, I go crazy. So to flex my design muscle, I made a big desktop calendar for the grand month of May, which also happens to be the month of my birth. Here it is, at 1600×1200.
For more of these great botanical images, check out this set on flickr.
Click preview to see full image, right-click that image to save:
Today feels like the actual first day of spring: people are out at the beaches, the windows are open, and the air feels warmer. Thus, it is the perfect time to begin spring cleaning, and although I’m a week late, I love Apartment Therapy’s cure. It tells you step by step how to make your home beautiful and comfortable and functional, and does it in just eight weeks. I’ve always tried to do the fall cure and never finished it because it ran into holidays when I was off gadding about the country visiting family. So when I noticed that last week was the start of the spring cure, I decided to jump in and actually finish this one.
If you’ve never done an AT cure before, I suggest you get a copy of the book and follow along with it. If you have done it before, or just want to take the next two months to do a little spring cleaning, you can follow along with me. Before you do anything, I do recommend taking a day or two and doing a thorough dusting and cleaning of floors throughout. Done? Okay. Moving on.
I’m always on a tight budget when I do this cure, and this year is no exception. The goal is to repurpose and reuse what’s already here, and buy from thrift stores, garage sales, craigslist, or flea markets for anything that’s absolutely necessary. Since I just did the fall cure, the kitchen has stayed mostly clutter-free and organized … save the pantry.
This is how the pantry looked last fall after the cure:
This is how the pantry looked last fall after I finished week two.
While it looks pretty organized here, there are some reasons why, while the rest of the kitchen remained organized, this eventually turned into this:
Things quickly deteriorate when there's no plan.
Over the last few months I’ve been buying some baskets and whatnot that I find if they’re cheap and unique, and I realized they were sitting empty, waiting to help me reorganize the pantry. It was difficult to keep the pantry organized before because, even though there were some containers and spaces for things, they weren’t organized in any meaningful way. Some grains were on one shelf, some on another, and packaged and canned goods were sort of spread out wherever they’d fit. So when something new came into the pantry, there wasn’t any clear place to put it, and it just got shoved wherever there was room.
By adding containers and giving items a place, I hope we can keep the pantry a little more organized this time.
Simple printed labels and a vintage candy dish (a Fiesta turquoise cream soup bowl, actually) help keep things organized.
The gym basket and the coffee tin were picked up at flea markets for less than $20 total.
Now, the two things that tend to get most out of control in our pantry - canned goods and packaged foods - have their own baskets. Does this mean that the pantry will still look like this when I start the fall cure, without any intermediate effort? No! Just like you (hopefully) maintain your refrigerator by cleaning it out frequently, check our your pantry monthly to get rid of anything stored there that shouldn’t be, like languishing foods you bought on a whim and are never going to eat, or things that are better suited to take up space in a storage closet than a pantry. Bottom line - treat the pantry like any other workspace and keep it clean and organized, and skip the mass-produced plastic bins in favor of vintage and recycled containers.
I like the wooden-crate-as-bookshelf aesthetic. I hear the idea is now passé, but any chance I get to use old wooden things, I’ll take it. So I’ve been particularly delighted lately to be seeing so many wooden boxes at flea markets lately - small, large, open, hinged, whatever - along with things like rope and tools with lots of potential. These are all from the Santa Monica Art + Antique Fair, which happens on the first and third Saturday at the high school at the corner of Lincoln and Ocean Park. Admission is $1.
These hinged wooden boxes were inexpensive - no more than $10 each.
I really wanted this long footlocker-type box, but even flea market junkies have to recognize their spatial and financial limits. Still, at an asking price of $20, it wasn't bad.
There's a mess of wonders here.
I always see old rope used in magazine photos and think, where did they get that? Well, here's one place.
Oh, the potential! I'd love to hang a plant or chair from that pulley.
As any good thrifter knows, the key to being able to use these things is learning how to look without context - develop the ability to see an object with a mess of other objects on a table, mentally pull it off the table and place it in a completely different context. Happy shopping!
