st. augustine.

My cousin declared Saturday the 11th to be my fake birthday, since she wouldn't be here for the real one, so we put on our cutest polka dot dresses and headed to my favorite place in Florida (probably the only place in fl I actually like), St Augustine. We were going to make a stop at the st john's flea market first, but we got a bit of a late start so we picked up some sprinkle donuts and coffee and went straight to historic downtown. We visited the Lightner Museum (which will take up a whole post on it's own) and spent the day walking around and peeking into cute antique shops and eating macarons, and I kept finding pretty little gifts throughout the day; one sitting on the seat of my car when I got in, another mysteriously popping up on the table when I came to sit down, etc.

It was such a lovely day (aside from the weather which was disgustingly hot and almost unbearable) and I felt pretty special all day, like it was my real birthday. We ate lunch at a little wine bar that looked cute and promising but ended up being sort of terrible and awkward, but despite the odd, pushy owners and weird food we had a fun time at our little table and there were little white lights hanging across the ceiling, which pretty much makes any situation better. And at the end, when I came back from the restroom, there was a pile of gifts and a giant cookie and sparkler candles waiting for me and it was pretty amazing.

1940s style glasses - anthropologie

1930s swiss dot dress (from this post) - ebay
navy vintage bag - thrifted

cousin visit.



My cousin left today to go back home to New York, it was a long fun exhausting week filled with much eating and shopping and lots of silly girly fun. She arrived on Thursday and after I picked her up from the airport we went to a nearby mall in Orlando to eat. We ended up going to the Cheescake Factory because it was there and we were starving, and we got huge burritos/tacos that we could barely finish even half of, and then of course, I ordered a big slice of white chocolate raspberry cheesecake to go. We got coffee and walked around for a little bit, browsing in Anthropologie, where I picked up a few of my favorite soaps and a pair of 1940s style sunglasses, and Urban Outfitters, which was even more underwhelming than usual but I bought a pretty 60s inspired lace dress on sale that I unfortunately won't be able to wear until probably October because it has long sleeves.

We went to bed pretty early because she was tired from the flight and I from working the day before and from last minute errands earlier that day, and the next day we woke up early to go to an estate sale that wasn't very good, and some antique stores that weren't very good either. We were going to have lunch on Canal Street but after driving up and down and not really finding anything too appealing at the moment we decided to have lunch at Mulligan's, a cute pub nearby which is a staple of mine so I knew we'd find lots of things we liked on the menu. After lunch we got frozen yogurt and then settled in pretty early yet again so we could get up early the next day to go to St Augustine, which I will talk about in a future post!

dress - urban outfitters like three years ago

sandals - target

vintage heart locket - thrifted

40s style glasses - anthropologie

june eighth.



I've been terrible at keeping this updated (I probably have been/will continue to begin many of my posts this way), but I have good reason. As I mentioned previously, I've been cleaning and organising like crazy, trying to rearrange everything how I want it and getting rid of clothes and things I no longer want or wear to make things a little less cluttered and a little more pretty. I've been in the process of doing this little by little over the past few months but when I found out my lovely cousin/best friend was coming to visit very soon I started scrambling to get things done even quicker. She will be arriving tomorrow afternoon, and we have some really cute/fun little dates planned (mixed in with just the right dose of laziness and doing nothing). Exciting!

There were a few things I needed at the market so when I walked in today and saw these pretty flowers I grabbed a few bunches to arrange and spread out around the house. I spent at least an hour snipping away at stems and leaves and arranging little bouquets (and apologising to the flowers as I cut them, I'm strange) and placing them in my favorite glass bottles and jars, and then spent almost as much time snapping photos of them because I think they turned out really lovely.

memorial day.

Memorial day this year consisted of cookouts and sparklers and cream soda and patchwork quilts and everything else good Summer holidays are supposed to include. 'Patriotic' holidays always make me really nostalgic, every fourth of july week of my childhood was spent in Ocean City, Md, a beach town made up of amusement parks, rows of hotels, a striped umbrella-covered beach, and a boardwalk filled with taffy shoppes, ferris wheels and carousels. Think of Atlantic city circa 1920s or the fictional town of Amity and that's Ocean City.

My entire family- aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents- would pack up their cars and make the three hour drive, where we all rented our own beach houses in the same little neighborhood. The week was spent riding carnival rides and playing arcade games on the boardwalk, eating cotton candy, watching fireworks over the bay, laying on blankets in the grass, swimming in the ocean, and eating strawberries until our little fingers were stained red. All the perfect things that make up childhood Summers.  I'll have to dig up some photos of those Summers, because that place really was magical! I heard it's kind of taken a bad turn over recent years, which makes me sad because I want that place to always be how I remember it. (or like this:)

french labels.

There's something so beautiful about french labels from the past, with their beautiful lettering and romantic images. I've always been taken with them. When it comes to antique packaging, the more faded, tea stained, and soiled the paper is, the more beautiful it becomes. I've been collecting old french (and english) ephemera; prints, book plates, labels, for a long while, and now that I'm reorganising my room and trying to fill up a bare wall, I've been searching online for more pretty ones to frame and stick in the blank spots. Here are some really lovely ones I've come across on recent searches, these are not for sale, but still nice to look at nonetheless.

this one isn't french, but, strawberries! i had to include it!

5.27

Due to some new changes in my work schedule, mostly because of the end of busy season but because of some other things as well, I've been working a whole lot less and thrifting a lot more to make up the difference, and also because I hope to eventually do etsy full time. I've really been trying to throw myself back into it the way I used to, when I went to multiple thrift/antique stores everyday during the week and estate sales on the weekends. I went through the paper this week and made a big list of all the good estate sales and auctions and I'm hoping to wake up pretty early tomorrow to get to as many of them as I can. Hopefully they'll be good ones and I'll have some good finds to share when the day is over.

I've been trying to get back into this sort of routine little by little, going to antique shops on my short work days or days off. On one recent antique store visit, when I went looking for a glass reamer to make lemonade with, I discovered an amazing 1920s/30s embroidered floral wool cape the likes of which anthropologie would probably like to get their hands on. I actually discovered it almost a year ago, but it was reaaaally expensive then so I just kind of admired it every time and then sadly put it back, slightly hidden, hoping no one else would snap it up. But this time it was on super sale so I had to grab it. I started thinking when I got home though, and realized how silly it is to own a wool cape in fl, where we're lucky if it gets down to 40° in the Winter, so it'll probably eventually be heading for the shop.

I've been in the process of cleaning and reorganising my room lately, and I now have one sad blank wall, so I've been keeping my eye out for pretty antique picture frames for my many antique prints that I've been waiting to hang foreeever. Now that I finally have a place to hang them I just need more frames. And I can finally hang my olde crumbling mirror that's sitting on an olde apple crate and leaning against my window, so now it won't fall over anytime I have my window open on a windy day.

I only have a short time to get everything situated, because I have an exciting visitor coming reeeeal soon.But more on that later. xx

dream within a dream.

This past weekend and the end of last week were uncharacteristically nice weather-wise, instead of the mid-ninety degree weather we'd been having, it returned to a late Winter/early Spring-like (for Fl) mid-seventy degrees. I had a big list of things to do on Saturday but when I felt how nice it was outside I decided that those things would just have to wait and threw on this cotton 1930s dress I'd been really excited about wearing, grabbed a picnic basket and hat and out I went. It was such a lovely, lazy day filled with peach iced tea in pretty glass cups, warm grass, and just enough sunshine. I snapped a few photos for my shops, and some of them unintentionally turned out sort of Picnic at Hanging Rock?

The dress. The dress is a light pink cotton 1930s dress with navy blue swiss dots, little ruffle sleeves and three little navy colored bows at the neckline. Oh! and the buttons- big, carved plastic, perfect 1930s navy blue buttons down the back. I'm facing a bit of a dilemma, however. This dress as it is is quite the dream dress, kind of a pretty lawn dress inspired sort of thing, but I'm not sure how practical (for me) it is right now and I'm really considering removing the ruffle at the hem. I'd really hate to alter or hem a vintage dress, and it's super pretty how it is, but I feel like if I removed the ruffle I would not only like it way better, but I would live in this dress, like wear it to pieces until it was a pretty little scrap to be hung on my wall I would wear it so often. There are a few scattered stains on the bottom so it's not like it would be pure frivolity, right?

vintage straw hat available here

antique picnic basket available here

UPDATE: I went ahead and pulled, yes pulled, the ruffle off, and I don't feel one bit bad about it. I inspected the seam more closely and there had been numerous poor mends in the past, and it seems that the ruffle may even have been a later addition using the same fabric. So I found a spot (there were several) were the seam was already separated and gave it a gentle tug and the seams pulled right apart, no seam ripper required.