Cute dog collars from DogGoneKnitting on etsy

I ordered two super cute collars for Boris and Harlow and they came today - Dignified geometrics for Boris and cakes for Harlow!
They were very excited to put them on, only because they thought that putting on collars meant that they were going for a ride!

I ordered them from - DogGoneKnitting
They are available in several sizes and they are nice quality.

Amazing! baby hummingbird rehab

Winona Ryder and the envy-inspiring clothing in 'When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story'

Sunday night (after my team won this week's leg of The Amazing Race!) - 'When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story' aired. It was a made for tv movie about the woman who started Al-Anon. OK, so I only started watching it because there was nothing else on, and the melodrama kind of drug on and on. But, the clothing was fabulous! Many cute 1920s cloche hats and great dresses. Even when they were poor and struggling she had some sweet dresses.
The movie starts in the late Teens and the bulk of it is in the 1920-30s. They start off with a good income and fancier clothing, but end up poor and in kind of plain clothing - no glamorous bias gowns in the 1930s time period of the movie - but I realized that I enjoyed the everyday clothing probably more than glamour gowns because that's what the average person was really wearing during that time. The costume designer for the movie was Trysha Bakker.
And Winona looks great, not just in the clothing, she looks like she is aging very little and doing it naturally. Her face looks real is what I mean. Plus she is still like a Pixie-Woman. When you see her with other women she still seems smaller and younger.

This sweet little green chiffon dress has been with me for 20 years, and some personal reflection

I bought this dress, and the two hats below (along with another wide straw hat covered in daisies with rhinestone centers - that I was too lazy to walk to the other end of the house to get for this blog post) at my favorite old time thrift shop - 'The Leprechaun Shop'. Ah, those were the days, when you could find something older than 1980s in a thrift shop. It was run to raise funds for the St. John of God Special Education School. The shop was down a narrow one-way street in Woodbury and it was run by church ladies who volunteered their time. The prices were written on a big carboard sign hanging behind the counter and they never changed for as long as I shopped there, which was for over 15 years.

I remember that I bought these items 20 years ago, because it was in 1990, when my Mom had a brain aneurysm and then a stroke. She was in Pennsylvannia Hospital for over 2 months. I quit my job and went to the hospital every day with my Grandmother. Came home, made dinner for my dad after he came home from work, and then went back to the hospital with my Dad after dinner.

Then she was moved to Bryn Mawr Rehab as an inpatient and she was there over 3 months. We couldn't visit until after 5PM, so during the day I was packing to move, because my parents had just started building a new house when my Mom ended up in the hospital. Construction continued because my Dad wanted her to come home to a new, larger house. We changed the plans to make the door to her bedroom and bathroom bigger in case she came home in a wheelchair. I barely remember packing though, it's like it was all a blurr.

It was one day that I went over to the thrift shop for something else to do, a little break (Dandelion Vintage was still 7 years away) I ended up buying this dress, another small chiffon dress from the same period, the 3 hats plus another. These were special items, so they were priced a little higher - $5 each. Well worth it. I bought some other items too, and that night when I went to visit my Mom, I took my haul with me to show her, because she loved thrift shops too. Over the years I've sold the other things that I bought that day, but I've held onto the dress and the hats.
The dress hangs on the door to my office here at Dandelion Vintage headquarters and I see it everyday. Two of the hats hang out here too and the other hat is in my bedroom.

Straw flowers above and chiffon flowers below -

The new house was finished a week after my Mom got out of the hospital, which was a few weeks before Christmas. I drove her to outpatient rehab 5 days a week for a year. I worked part time at night doing fittings and alterations in a bridal shop during that time. After rehab finished, she was able to walk with a cane and do some things around the house, so I went back to work full time. After 5 years at that job I was fired, and I during my unemployment, I ended up setting up shop on the internet and Dandelion Vintage was born!

I often wonder what my life would have been like if my Mom hadn't had her stroke. If I hadn't lived at home all those years, if I had gone out on my own. When I worked fulltime in retail, I was miserable. I liked my job, but I hated the main office and the way that they wanted things done. I wanted my own shop and I knew how to run one because I had hands-on experience. I was miserable at home too, I felt trapped, and felt that I would never be able to move out. But once I started Dandelion Vintage, things changed. I was finally happy with what I was doing with my life and I was able to deal with the stress of having a disabled Mother. My Dad has retired now so it's mainly on him for now, I'm just the backup.

I bought my own house. Then what did I do a year later? I sold it and moved with my parents to down here in the Woods! But it's alright, I feel very lucky. Things happen for a reason, why the hell they do it the long hard way, I don't know. But this is where I'm meant to be. If I had been selfish and left my Dad to care for my Mom alone, who knows what I'd be doing now? Slogging it out in retail, probably barely making enough  money to squeek by. I would never have been able to afford to live on just my savings while I tried to get a business started - and it was a long time before I started making a somewhat steady income from vintage. There might not have been a Dandelion Vintage if I had thought only of myself and what I wanted back then.

Wow, this turned into a deep post. I love that little green chiffon dress.

Time to pack away the boots and bring out my Summer Vintage shoes!

We had several warm days here this week, one day it hit 90! Yay Spring. So I very happily packed away my boots, they got alot of use this Winter, too much use. And I pulled out some of my Strappy Vintage Summer Shoes. Now, just a reminder, these are mine, mine, mine. They won't be for sale on the website.

OK, I lied. The black wedges below I actually wore during cold weather with black opaque stockings, so I didn't actually just unpack those. Yes, I do have a small foot. Size 6, but it is very wide, so I still have trouble finding shoes wide enough for them.

Summer, la la la-la! Don't strappy wedges make you happy?

These super strappy shoes will have to wait a few more months for wearing.

More wedges.

And here are a few Summery vintage purses. I've had the upright white one for a while. But the others are ones that I picked up this Winter.

Bring on the Summer!

Great-Great-Great Aunt Martha

I'm doing some family research, tracing the family lines. I've heard my Grandmom talk about her 'Aunt Mart'. She was Martha Redrow, and she was actually my great-grandfather's aunt. She was married twice, to a Parker and then to a Bishop. Both husbands died and she never had any children.

I was thrlled to find out from a 1900 census, that she was actually a dressmaker on Glover Street in Woodbury NJ. This was after her fist husband had died, and she is listed as Martha Parker Widow Dressmaker. I asked my grandmom and she remembers hearing that Aunt Mart had been a dressmaker at one time. Apparently the 2nd husband was wealthy and moved her out of Woodbury and she gave up making dresses. I think this photo was taken during her 2nd marriage.
After the 2nd husband died, she moved back to the old family farm in Deptford. She lived briefly with her nephew Edward Redrow (my great-grandfather)  who was recently widowed, and my grandmom who was about 11 at the time.
Later Aunt Mart moved down the road to her niece Hattie Redrow Vollmer's farm, and apparently that's where she died in 1929.
What a treasure it would be to be able to find a dress that Aunt Mart had made! The only way would be if someone in the family had kept one. I think she only made dresses out of her home, and I doubt that she had fancy labels.