We had cupcakes instead of wedding cake at our reception, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t hot on the heels for a wedding cake topper as soon as I found out I was engaged. As an avid admirer of vintage wedding cake toppers, this was really fun for me.

I knew I found the perfect one when I spotted this charming couple in an antique mall in Wisconsin.

These aren’t really mine anymore, they’re promised to my mom. I had them wrapped and in my purse, ready to give her for Christmas, then left the little package in my purse all through the visit. She will see them on the blog as a favorite find and say, “Oh! They’re your favorites! I can’t take them!” but the reason I offered them to her in the first place is that I adore them but have no place for them. Imagine how four tiny fists would love to get a hold of these delicate beauties.

They’re about three inches high. Aren’t they cute? I just love the delicate detail on their faces.

Mom, they’ll be yours soon!

Friends, things have been slow in the vintage shopping arena lately — not much to report. Between it being the dark of the Chicago winter and a continuous stream of illness in the household, I haven’t really gotten out much. You’re probably going to be seeing a lot of Link Love posts in the upcoming weeks…and a new feature I’ve been thinking about — Favorite Finds. As I have to continuously shift things around in the apartment making ever more room for our delightful babies, I am making bigger and bigger giveaway stacks as I deliberate between what I really love and what I can do without. In doing this I’m reliving some of my favorite purchases over the years and thought I would photograph them to see if you love them as much as I do.

First up: this bust that I got from the basement of a Candace estate sale about six or seven years ago.

She was at a sale in Hyde Park, and I had had no luck in the main part of the house, so headed around the side of the house to the entrance of the basement. I love basements at Estate Sales. It’s where I have the most luck. A lot of times, the person whose house it is has re-located all of their old stuff to the basement to make room for the new, improved stuff, which, as you know, I don’t find so improved. Candace’s basements are the BEST. I mean this in the most complimentary way: they are usually junky, overflowing, and dirty. AWESOME. I think more snooty estate sale companies resist taking on houses that are overtly messy, but I get the idea that that’s never stopped Candace, and I have ALWAYS found better stuff at her sales than any other sales in the Chicagoland area. And I’ve said this before, but Candace doesn’t overprice stuff, and she loves it when you find something she hasn’t seen yet. I just adore her.

I think I paid $5 for this bust. I’m not sure what she’s made out of, but it’s a very heavy metal, whatever it is. The shoulders, which are unpainted, are kind of copper-y.

I sold regularly (not sporadically, like I do now) on eBay for a while — at least a couple of years, and I was always so amazed at how much the world of eBay creates its own little laws of supply and demand. Randomly, I would discover, on accident, an item that fetched a way higher price on eBay than it ever would in the real world. Then, of course, I would pick it up if I ever saw it at a thrift store or yard sale. Because no one can know about everything that enters this weird universe of out-sized pricing on eBay, you can usually still find some of this stuff for cheap. Some examples of items I sold many years ago that went for much higher than I could have expected:

These aren’t the actual photos of the things I sold — it was about six or seven years ago and I can’t find them — but they’re pretty close. The purse bank craze on eBay had them selling for between $100 and $150, even with chips. The one pictured sold for a little over $50, so that’s dropped, but it’s still fairly high for such an item, I think. I had a set of eight of those Westmoreland fruit plates: I found them with some other random milk glass items in a laundry basket on the floor in the Brown Elephant on Clark (oh, how I miss that store. I got some great stuff from that location.) They had it all taped over, like they do with dish sets, which drives me crazy, because you can’t really see what’s inside — but I asked a price and was quoted $12 for all of it so figured it was worth a risk. I didn’t even do research on these plates before I put them up — didn’t even label them Westmoreland, because I didn’t know they were — and they sold for a little over $200. A set of six recently sold for $60, so that was a passing phase as well. The tole TV trays sold for around $150 — and a quick check tells me they’re still selling for around $100 for a set of four. I do not get that.

I was looking to find a starting price for the paper lanterns I want to list on Etsy and the vintage Christmas seals I’m finally ready to get rid of all together when I found a few other things that boggled my mind.

These vintage papier mache Halloween are selling for ridiculous prices right now — between $100 and $500! Have they always sold for that much or is this another craze?

Several sets of these Christmas seals sold for between $100 and $125 recently! For 25 seals! I mean, what do you do with these once you get them home, knowing you spent that much money on them?

In a way it’s awesome when something you totally weren’t expecting to sell for much explodes its price at the end of the auction. But in a way, it’s not, because it doesn’t seem like a fair price. It’s like the Beanie Baby craze, when everyone lost their minds and were paying hundreds of dollars for these stuffed animals, convinced they were going to be worth so much money in the future. I don’t like to be a part of the machine when people lose their senses like that. Makes me feel kind of bad. There’s also the whole competitive side of eBay, where people become determined to win an auction, no matter the cost, just because someone is bidding against them. People end up spending way more than they should because of that factor as well. Of course, none of that is my business! If they want to spend the money, they should spend the money. Just my anxiety-prone, controlling nature taking over, as usual…and the truth of the matter is, I still put some things (like barkcloth, for example) on eBay because I think it sells better than it would on Etsy.  But all in all, I’ve come to appreciate the straight-forward nature of Etsy — I price it, if they like the price, they buy it, if not, they don’t. Pretty simple, right?

I’m probably late to this party, but have you guys seen houzz.com? A HUGE collection of interior photos to use for ideas and inspiration. I did a search for “vintage”…I will see you in March, when I MIGHT have finished going through all of the photos. Very cool resource.

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!