Not letting go of summer, not yet...

It's late summer and maybe you aren't ready to let go into autumn yet.  I'm not especially ready, myself.  Even when it's mid-January, you need reminders of summer in the house:

The bright green of the grass shows up in vintage enameled cups:

The garden produce looks out at you from vintage 1920's seed packets:

Sunflowers nod at you from a vintage souvenir cup and saucer set:

And the fairy of wheat harvest is baking bread!

A noob blog

I decided to fire up a chatty Etsy shop blog over here on Blogspot, because my shop blog on Tumblr is all about visuals.  And I love that about Tumblr, but I also like to write -- as anyone who looks at my item descriptions well knows.  The downside to having more items in my Etsy shop is that I don't take the time to be goofy and creative in my item descriptions the way I did a year or so ago.    Here is a listing where I was having big giant fun, and here is another one that is a nod to David Sedaris.  That crazy little man makes me laugh really hard. 

I have no idea how I became so obsessed with illustrated books from the early-to-mid 20th century.  They just found me.  I have my favorites and I have my own collection, but because I'm always looking for and finding great books, I buy them and end up selling them.  I consider vintage book collecting to be a form of historic preservation; they are rare little things because children loved them to death, threw them around and destroyed them, scrawled all over them, or they just got tossed out with Granny's other belongings. 

They feel like magic to me when I hold them in my hand, and I have an Etsy shop so they can find their way into the hands of people who want a little magic in their lives.  I'm going to do posts in the next few days about some of my favorite illustrators, why I love them, and expound upon my weird little theories (all entirely unsubstantiated) about them.  It will be a little bit like reading historical fiction.