ebay finds, Altering Vintage and nerdity

I'm just hanging out at the part time job this afternoon. It's a beautiful day outside, but here I am, inside, wasting time on a computer -

I found these 3 items on ebay - I love 1920-30s loungewear - and wouldn't you love a cabinet like this to put your patterns and other assorted junkies in? I love old cabinets like these with tons of drawers, I love the old wood. Click the pictures to check out the auctions.




This weekend I got around to reading that Threads magazine where my website was mentioned. The stories were good. My favorite was the one where they took 3 1940s gowns and put them on a dress form inside out and described how the draping and sewing details were done. Fascinating. I love the construction of dresses and could probably look at a whole book full of pictures of inside-out dresses.

My only complaint was in a story about whether or not to alter vintage clothing. Their advice started out good, saying that you shouldn't alter rare labeled items and that you shouldn't do alterations unless they can easily be removed without affecting the garment. Good advice.

But then the gal said that altering the style of some vintage clothing can increase the value. No. That's just not true. Sure, you can take a maxi dress and cut it off into a mini dress and sell it on ebay for a great price with the right kind of marketing and a cool looking model. But that selling price is not the true value of that garment, it's only a reflection of the current trend. Once the trend for maxis-cut-down-to-minis ends, the value of that garment is gone and all you are left with is a vintage dress that you paid too much for, that no longer fits a current trend and also no longer fits in with it's original style. I can understand some sellers cutting down dresses to cash-in on a trend, as long as they are honest and have disclosed that the dress has been cut in their listing.
But people shouldn't get the false idea that what trendy items are selling for on ebay is some sort of value guide. It just isn't a true reflection of the vintage market, it's a reflection of good marketing by the sellers of those items. I still believe that their target buying audience isn't really about actual vintage clothing. Those shoppers are buying a 'look' and whether the dress is 1960s or bought at WalMart last year - it doesn't matter to them about the age of the actual garment. It's about the Look and how it is marketed. And I am not knocking those sellers. They know their stuff and I know my stuff. I'm a vintage clothing lover, in business for 9 years, selling to gals who love old school vintage.



Geek Alert, yes, I'm going to talk about Harry Potter here. Today I read some alleged spoilers online. I don't mind spoilers, because they don't really 'spoil' it for me. I like to know what's going to happen ahead of time, but I still enjoy reading, or watching as it really happens. The spoilers that I read today had to be crap though, just rumors. They better be rumors, or I'll be mad if the ending I read was true. I just thought it was kind of sappy. I guess I want a dark ending. Plus some of the spoilers contradicted themselves. No more reading fake spoilers, they're pissing me off!