Every year when Christmas is over, I take an afternoon to remove all the holiday decor and tuck everything back into its respective box. As much as I enjoy decorating the house with all my vintage Christmas items, I always love the look of the house when things are a bit more sparse and simple. Like so many people, I gravitate to the "winter whites" for January. I have a decent collection of white McCoy pottery that I love to take out and display with just a few touches of greenery and maybe a few vintage books (imagine that). Most of the time I keep the look up until February. It's nice to simplify after the rush of the holiday...
I have been super busy getting products ready for the upcoming shows! My workroom has become a whirlwind of book journals, album cover notebooks, ornaments, clipboards, bottle openers, and more. Thankfully I have had a bit of handyman help from my husband. Truly appreciate all the assistance. This summer has also kept me busy with online orders! I love having the time to post new products! Social media has brought me many new customers and connections, as well. Such fun! Work time on Cottage Indus-tree will soon become work time on school related projects! It won't be long until I am back in the classroom. August 1st is creeping up on me. Yikes! Here are the dates and locations where...
As a teacher, I still do SOME school work in June and July, but I also enjoy leafing through some of my favorite coffee table books. My husband would attest that I have way too many in my collection, but that's simply not true. Who can put a cap on inspiration? Ha! I love to read about other people with small businesses like mine and flip through pages filled with unique and interesting ways to incorporate vintage items in decorating. Seeing potentially discarded items put to use in unique settings is right up my alley. Here are a few in my vast collection all stacked up!
When I was young, I loved to collect bookmarks. The Scholastic book fairs at school always had a nice selection of bookmarks with puppies, kittens, rainbows...things an 8 year-old just loves. As I grew, I found I still loved to mark my reading material in pretty and unique ways. Along came the digital books, however, and I no longer needed bookmarks. You just put a digital tab on that Kindle download and away you went. If you are anything like me, however, I gravitated back to the basics. I still read books on my iPad, but the feel of "real" reading material just feels right. In the process of making my book journals I came to love not just the...
From time to time (usually at art shows) people ask me where I get my ideas and love of all things old/vintage. It's in my genes, I think. My parents were antique dealers (my dad was also a dentist and my mother, a nurse). They did antique shows at the Ann Arbor Antique Show in Saline, Michigan and had their own shop (The Peddler Shoppe) in Sylvania, Ohio. When I was really small my mother would keep me busy at the shop with "little guys", as she would call them. She cut tiny figures out of old cardstock and I would embellish them with pencils and crayons. I loved those "little guys" and thought my mom was the coolest for...